2009-05-21: WMS Catalog With Layer Resolution
From Datafedwiki
We have recently developed the WMS Air Quality Catalog that contains WMS-accessible images from may AQ related servers. Currently, the resolution (rows) in the catalog are individual GetCapabilities. The data layers within each Capability are listed but accessible for tagging, filtering, re-organizing...In DataFed for example, the Capability docs are separated for each dataset, so there is an entry for each 'dataset'. However, the Capability docs from other WMS servers contain a mix of different layers from multiple datasets. This causes problems.
- The data content is defined by the data layer, not by the grouping in the Capabilities doc.
- The Catalog that allows only tagging and finding Capabilities is too coarse in resolution.
So we need to have a catalog that can be searched by data layer. So the atomic entity in the catalog (rows in the database?) should be the data layer. The attributes of each layer should not be a fixes set of predetermined columns but expandable 'tags'. i.e. need attached to the layers through an expandable link table.
For the current DataFed WMS each layer would inherit the attributes of the dataset as well as the Dataset_Abbr itself and a new set of tags.
