D4Science Infrastructure

Re: 1; why only for ASFIS Species? That suggests a link to FAO that is (currently) not established
Re: 3: it will be difficult to add AquaMaps to FAO species fact-sheets, and I do not believe this can be done on short notice. It would seem e.g. that FAO endorses AquaMaps over other methods, and we want to avoid that. We will help with identifying other contexts to use the map generation processes.

re 1: if we talk about catalogue, we refer more to the production of accurate and exhaustive metadata rather than a specific data format available for download. Accurate and exhaustive metadata for Aquamaps distributions, with simple links to WMS / WFS output formats would be of added value for the catalogue, but not necessarily its NetCDF representation
re 2: Formats supported through WFS are more than enough, we are dealing with bi-dimensional data. A potential usability of NetCDF, maybe, but which use case exactly. Hence i don't really understand the focus on NetCDF, except onr way to test and exploit the NetCDF simple generator developed recently.
re 3: can be removed from this ticket. It is not ever on table for FAO aquatic distributions, although the later are a product of FAO; so I doubt that Aquamaps would be considered, and more doubt about the format, linking to a page like ASFIS. If some day a link is attached to ASFIS for distributions, it will probably be linking to a FAO product, and endorsed by FAO.

As for point 1 and 2, generating a different format of an already existing layer may not seem as useful as generating more accurate metadata. Nevertheless, the NetCDF is way more reusable and portable than the other formats already supported through WFS and it’s naturally suited to represent raster information (like uniformly spaced species distributions). In fact, on top of being self-describing and designed to represent n-dimensional data with n >= 2, it is also widely used by many communities and research institutions as a standard and there is plenty of tools to visualize and manipulate such format. Moreover, additional information about the data can be included in the file itself as attributes, creating more complex objects that don't need any external reference to be fully understandable, and thus reusable and portable. Obviously my claims are backed-up by the documentation (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/user_guide.html). For all these reason we started by implementing the very general NetCDF converter I presented at the last TCOM, and we are currently trying to exploit all the features of this format. These has been discussed with Nicolas Bailly on July.

As for point 3, sure we can remove this one from the goals of this activity as also suggested by Anton. Thank you for pointing that out.

Paolo

10,835 maps have been produced by this ticket and are indexed on the data catalogue.
@leonardo.candela@isti.cnr.it , since these come from a huge processing of the infrastructure data, can they be considered in the KPIs?

Yes, why they should not be counted?

#972 KPI updated accordingly.

I'm wondering whether we should improve the quality of the accompanying metadata. I just open #9975 for that