March 4, 2015 -- The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using the GML Coverage Application Schema Standard.

This new addition to the netCDF suite of standards provides additional ways to serve complex multi-dimensional CF-netCDF data for use in geographic information systems (GIS) or other geospatial systems not capable of handling complex CF-netCDF data.

The OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard (Climate and Forecast conventions for netCDF) has emerged as a widely used and well supported data model and encoding for domains such as atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, meteorology, and hydrology. It supports multi-dimensional gridded data and multi-dimensional multi-point data representing space and time-varying phenomena.

This candidate standard specifies an extension of CF-netCDF 3.0. This extension is an encoding model of the CF-netCDF dataset that uses the OGC GML Application Schema – Coverages schema. The GML Application Schema – Coverages schema (GMLCOV) specifies the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) coverage structures to be used by OGC standards. OGC coverages are two- (and sometimes higher-) dimensional metaphors for phenomena found on or near a portion of the Earth's surface, including, for example, Earth imaging data, regular and irregular grids, point clouds, and meshes.

The OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using the GML Coverage Application Schema Standard supports three different ways of encoding the CF-netCDF data model: binary, XML, or ASCII.

The documents for the candidate OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using the GML Coverage Application Schema Standard Standard are available for review and comment at ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/131).

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

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