[R-sig-Geo] Making web-repository of gridded maps: NetCDF or WKT Raster?

[Servet Ahmet Cizmeli]

Hello,

I had done a similar design in my head a while ago too. Looking at your
message, I don't quite get how you would place Geoserver (or Mapserver)
operating in parallel with OpenDAP. Is there a data format that is
supported by both? To my knowledge, no... If I am outdated, I would
definitely be interested in knowing more about it.

Opendap nicely supports n-dimensional arrays through netcdf. To my
knowledge, however, geoserver does not. So you may have to stick with
OpenDAP, but regretfully loose support for interoperability through OGC
standarts.

What is your target user profile? Scientists who will
visualize/get/process/update the data? Or simple GIS users who would only
visualize/query? I guess OpenDAP is more suitable for the former while
GEOSERVER, the latter type of users.

Assuming that my knowledge on the subject is up-to-date, possible solutions
would be to write an WMS/WFS output driver to OpenDAP and offer users a
full set of possible choices 

The server-side processing could always be performed by R who would somehow
accept input from web in an URL formed by the JavaScript OpenLayers client.
I am sure this is technically possible but I am not proficient enough in R
to be able to say how ;o(

I have always dreamt of an OpenDAP client for R (similar to the Matlab
client). If we had one, scientists on the client-side could ALSO get the
data from the R command-line and process it at their will. 

This is a very interesting subject. please keep us updated. 
Servet