[webservices] Major update to fdsnws-station service: new database and new location IDs

[Chad Trabant]

Hello web service list,

Sorry for the misdirected mail previously, a glimpse of internal DMC 
coordination.  But it does afford me an opportunity to remind you of a 
big user-level change and explain some internal workings at the DMC.

The big change coming to the fdsnws-station service next week (assuming 
we get through testing by then) is the representation for empty location 
IDs.  We are making this change to comply with FDSN standards.

To illustrate, we currently represent empty location IDs as a string of 
two spaces, e.g:
in XML: <Channel locationCode="  " ...>
in channel-level text: IU|ANMO|  |LHZ|...

After the change those location IDs will collapse to empty strings, e.g:
in XML: <Channel locationCode="" ...>
in channel-level text: IU|ANMO||LHZ|...

Another big change more internal to the DMC is a transition from Oracle 
to a Postgres database backend.  We have been working hard to make this 
transition as seamless as possible for users of the DMC.  In regards to 
the fdsnws-station service, one result of this transition will be an 
equivalent but slightly different flavor of number representation.  For 
example, a zero may be represented now as "0.0" and later as simply 
"0".  The metadata content will be equivalent and we expect the vast 
majority of users to not notice the difference.

Be on the lookout for these changes coming soon.

Chad

> Chad Trabant <mailto:chad at iris.washington.edu>
> January 27, 2015 at 5:23 PM
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> On February 4th (Wednesday next week) we are planning a major update 
> to the fdsnw-station service including these changes (and many smaller 
> bug fixes):
>
> * Move to PPAS
> * Change empty location IDs from two-space strings to empty strings 
> (for FDSN conformance)
> ...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.iris.washington.edu/pipermail/webservices/attachments/20150127/28ab56af/attachment.html>