COAS — GCPR Project issue: Delivering Observation Data

There is one enhancement that will be treated in a separate issue paper: that of using another mechanism for the delivery of observation data such as XML or an IDL instead of the current nested ObservationData structure. For now we will simply mention that this is an area that needs to be enhanced. Massive amounts of data being moved across in the QueryAccess services need metadata or more descriptive access for clients to decode the data. We have suggested using XML in the any portion of the observation data structure. A DTD could be used for clients to decode the data in then XML stream. This removes the burden from the client of having to understand the internal data structures of the data being passed back. COTS products could be used to unwind the data and display the required portions. Versioning would also be easier to handle using XML since different versions of the DTD could be used to decode different XML format versions.