Teleconference on the demonstration of WIS to the WMO Cg

Thursday 3rd of March 2011, 9UTC, WMO WEBEX system

Participants:

Albert Brotzer (ASK)
Lipeng Jiang (CMA)
Markus Heene (DWD)
Marta Gutierrez (ECMWF)
Lothar Wolf (EUMETSAT)
Marian Majan (IBL)
Jose Mauro de Rezende (INMET)
Eizi Toyoda (JMA)
Walter Smith (NOAA)
Jean-Pierre Aubagnac (Meteo France)
Heiko Klein (met.no)
Karel del Waal (SAWS)
David Thomas (WMO)
Eliot Christian (WMO)
Timo Pröscholdt (WMO)

Background information:

• The CBS-demo teleconferences provide ample information on the GISC2GISC synchronization and OAI-PMH.

• 1st Doodle poll: http://doodle.com/ck5mesimgf4ha7k5
• 2nd Doodle poll: http://doodle.com/vyq6uidrv2k7wt7w

Meeting:

Summary

The meeting discussed the demonstration of WIS to the WMO Cg. The demonstration will consist of two parts. A one hour technical demonstration will be held in a side-meeting and there will be an exhibition space on WIS outside the meeting rooms in the days before Saturday 21th of May.
The main technical demonstration will be conducted by the audited WIS centres, with other centres invited to join in. Sufficient time will be allocated for other members that cannot join the main demonstration.
For the exhibition all WIS centres wishing to present their WIS centre implementations are invited to send technical experts to staff the exhibition space and/or to bring computers and posters on their centre. GISC centres are kindly asked to indicate on their posters the assistance they can provide to countries of their region, such as contact points, workshops, AMDCN etc., as bringing in new WIS centres will be crucial for the success of WIS in the next years.

Storyline

The meeting then discussed the details of the storyline of the demonstration. It noted that the audience will be high-level managerial and that thus clear arguments pointing out the value of becoming a WIS centre have to be communicated. These were found to be the benefits derived from the better availability/finding of data and the ease of publishing of new products.
A proposition of a story involving a country that wants to conduct a global food security analysis was discussed. The country would use WIS to find out about data and products in areas of interest and retrieve them. The product publishing into WIS would be demonstrated by uploading a new product into WIS, which is subsequently used to refine the food security analysis.
The proposal was considered suitable, but several points still need discussion.

• There is a risk that the topic of food security would be interpreted as stepping into the responsibility of other WMO programs.

This risk can be mitigated by focusing on searching and retrieving data and products, using the food security only as overarching theme.

• Given the high number of participating centres it is unclear if there are enough roles for everybody.

The scenario provides at least for the following roles. One country doing the analysis. One GISC which is searched. Two GISCs and two DCPCs from which data or products are downloaded. One GISC and a DCPC involved in publishing a new product into WIS. Maybe another GISC which shows subscription services and near real time delivery.

• Each participating centre has to think about which of their products or datasets could be of use in a hypothetical food security analysis.
• It is unclear how other aspects of WIS, such as near real time delivery of data can be incorporated into the scenario.

The participants agreed to study the scenario outlined above and to provide feedback during the next teleconference.

Technical synchronization testing

The meeting then discussed the metadata synchronization testing. It noted that the Congress demonstration will require the capabilities that are tested during the synchronization tests, but that participating in the Congress demonstration is not dependent on participation in the testing at this point, as centres are also able to join in at a later point in time. CMA, DWD, INMET and JMA are ready for testing, and Meteo France informed that a openWIS prototype would be available for synchronization testing in roughly two weeks time. It was thus agreed that the testing would be scheduled so that the beginning of the tests coincide with the time window available at Meteo Frances contractor. KMA and the U.S. NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS) also expressed interest in participating, conditioned on the outcomes of next week’s openWIS steering committee and the WMO JumpStart visit respectively.
The testing consists of synchronizing a test namespace of metadata between GISCs and DCPCs. Inserts, updates and deletions are done at the local WIS centre and their correct propagation to all other GISCs is monitored.
More concisely, each WIS centre participating in the tests, generates 100 metadata records belonging to the namespace “urn:x-wmo:md:int.wmo.wis.test5:XXX”. These metadata records are subsequently inserted, updated and deleted from the catalogue. The WIS centre is responsible for checking that the changes have successfully propagated to the other GISCs. An online tool that is helpful with this task has been developed by JMA (http://www.gisc.kishou.go.jp/toyoda/syncmon/news.atom), but since it only compares the identifiers of the metadata records, a local tool to compare the content of the XML files is also needed. DWD have also developed a tool that they might share on request.
In the case of a DCPC, the DCPC uploads the updated metadata records to its GISC using the procedure that has been established bilaterally. In the case of a GISC, the changed metadata records are made available to the other GISCs via OAI-PMH.
For OAI-PMH, each GISC has to create two OAI-sets. One, named WISTEST-#GISCNAME# (e.G WISTEST-INMET or WISTEST-CMA) contains the metadata of the GISCs area of responsibility. This is, if some DCPCs upload metadata to the GISC in the course of the testing, these records are to be included into the WISTEST-#GISCNAME# OAI-set. The other OAI-set is called WISTEST-CATALOGUE, and contains the contents of WISTEST-#GISCNAME# as well as all the other records harvested from the other GISC. The intra-GISC harvesting process works as follows. A GISC wishing to synchronize the catalogue, retrieves from each GISC the contents of WISTEST-#GISCNAME#, where #GISCNAME# is the name of the GISC that it currently synchronizes with. The addresses of the OAI-providers will be made available in the next teleconference.
The meeting discussed the format of the metadata records. Everybody was pleased to learn that Meteo France will soon make available the baseline metadata in WMO core profile 1.2, providing WIS centres for a solid base for testing. DWD also announced that its metadata generator will be able to generate WMO core profile 1.2 compliant metadata. The participants in the testing will thus have 1.2 conformant metadata records at hands, and it was decided, core profile 1.2 metadata would be used for the testing, although it was noted that for the non-GTS data likely to be involved in the food security story, only ISO19139 conformance is needed.

The participants agreed to schedule another teleconference on either Monday or Tuesday 14th / 15th of March to discuss the details and the exact beginning of the synchronization tests.