This document contains both the discussions, and the agreed recommendations, for best practices when using SOS.

Although the OOSTethys team initially identified these best practice topics from working on the OOSTethys use cases, the team attempts to discuss and describe each best practice as it applies to a generally similar application. So these best practices should in most cases apply beyond OOSTethys, to many or even most applications using the technology.

Each practice is marked with '[proposed]' until it is finalized and agreed by the team. Then the marker is removed.

Best Practice Topic List

URI Format

Best Practice [proposed]:

What kind of URI do we want to use?

Feature of Interest Specification

The SOS observation has a tag called FeatureOfInterest {check/fix}. This can be filled out with free text or a URI {check/fix}.

Best Practice [proposed]: Fill out this tag with a URI reference to a unique feature in a gazetteer.

Best Practice [proposed]: The reference should be to a term within a gazetteer with the following qualities:

1. each feature has a unique ID that can be referred to with a URI;
2. each feature has a corresponding physical location that can be obtained via a documented web service;
3. physical locations include Z dimension when appropriate; and
4. follows modern policies for well-managed repositories {link to policy page}.

Best Practice [proposed]: Use the most constrained feature that fits the data.

Specifying Properties

1. OOSTethys attempted to use CF standard names and units of measure (uom) which was a key element in achieving interoperability and easing the work in developing Semantic Mediation.
2. This was done via CF lookup tables in various Cookbooks
3. These were converted into standard URI's
   

Specifying Procedures

To be provided...

Community Building

1. Utilize Cookbooks to ease broad community participation by both technical and non-technical data providers. OOSTethys currently has 14 organizations participating as data providers.
2. Utilize a Registry

Registry

Support for GET METHOD