Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1.3.2.
Catalog services
Metadata are an important basis of catalog services. The OGC Catalog Service
defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data,
services, and other potential resources. Providers of resources use catalogs to
register metadata that conform to the provider's choice of an information model
(e.g. descriptions of spatial references, thematic information). Catalog services are
either web-based or client applications that can be searched for geospatial data and
services in very efficient ways. Catalog services need standardized metadata
according to ISO. The most important catalog service in Europe is INSPIRE the
European geospatial data infrastructure. Catalog services will increase in importance
in meteorology and climatology, but will need considerable effort in metadata
servicing and handling.
1.4. Future perspectives
The integration of meteorology and climatology into GIS is an ongoing,
extremely dynamic process, for which future perspectives are hard to predict.
However, it can be assumed that meteorology and climatology will strongly benefit
from integration into the GIS community because of the technical progress
associated with GIS. In particular, the exchange and transfer of data with users and
across disciplines will be significantly improved, and thus, it will be much easier for
weather and climate models to integrate relevant (and updated) datasets from other
disciplines (e.g. land use, soil, vegetation). The strong innovation and technological
progress in GIS and emerging tools and applications will even stimulate the already
well-established tools for weather forecasting in the future. The pressure towards
web-based services will also force meteorology and climatology to more
standardized metadata according to ISO standards. Finally, there is currently also
great interest from GIS industry to incorporate meteorology and climatology and
especially considering the special demands (in the OGC standards) from these
disciplines.
Spatial data infrastructures like INSPIRE will additionally push forward the
integration of meteorology and climatology into GIS. Geospatial data
interoperability will soon include climate and weather data. OGC standards like
WMS, WCS, WFS and new standards to be developed will soon fully be adopted by
meteorology and climatology, and thus, enable the incorporation of meteorological
and climatological data into different services. However, an important drawback
still exists because of the different data policy of the various data providers (NHMs
in particular), which could be a significant barrier to further development. Aside
from this impedance, Shipley [SHI 05] stated that these parallel universes are
already joined, or will soon unite in the future.
