To follow the progress of the OCEANS IE, review the minutes of the weekly teleconferences. Currently the OCEANS IE is working on Experiment #1.

The OCEANS IE -- formally approved as an OGC Interoperability Experiment in December 2006 -- engages data managers and scientists in the Ocean-Observing community to advance their understanding and application of various OGC specifications, solidify demonstrations for Ocean Science application areas, harden software implementations, and produce candidate OGC Best Practices documents that can be used to inform the broader ocean-observing community. To achieve these goals, the OCEANS IE engages the OGC membership to assure that any recommendations from the OCEANS IE will properly leverage the OGC specifications. The OCEANS IE could prompt Change Requests on OGC Specifications, which would be provided to the OGC Technical Committee to influence the underlying specifications. However, this IE will not develop any new specifications, rather, participants will implement, test and document experiences with existing specifications.

Initiators: SURA (lead), Texas A&M University, MBARI, GoMOOS and Unidata.

Specific goals:

• Compare Sensor Observation Service (SOS) from the OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative to the Web Feature Service (WFS) as applied to ocean data in a variety of data formats including text files, netCDF files, relational databases, and possibly native sensor output; (see Experiment #1 for details)
• Make use of semantic mediation via Semantic Web technologies to allow plurality of identification for source types (platforms and sensors) and phenomena types;
• Test aggregation services and caching strategies to provide efficient queries;
• Explore possible enhancements of THREDDS server, so that THREDDS resident data sources might be made available via SOS or WFS;

The initiators intentionally kept the objectives broad because, while specifically interested in SWE and its relation to WFS, the intention is to remain open to adapting other specifications if they determined that one or another is required. For example, all OGC web service specifications will have SOAP bindings and WSDL descriptions, so OOSTethys developers' previous experience with SOAP/WSDL that may be relevant, and will be documented as part of the resulting Best Practices document that will come out of the project.

Although participants will likely have experience in ocean sciences, potential participants from other disciplines should be aware that the semantic content is not and will not be pre-determined by the SOS or WFS specification. Rather, discipline-specific semantics can be incorporated in a general fashion and applied to other science domains. Common data structures and controlled vocabularies (e.g., conventions specified by CF or COARDS and commonly used by netCDF users) are not requirements per se, but their semantic content does get incorporated into the XML of an SOS either with a URI or by being called out explicitly in the tags (XML tags specify the encoded metadata that describe the data source and the data provided by the services).