Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS) Sensor Observation Service (SOS) The OCEANS IE -- formally approved as an OGC Interoperability Experiment in December 2006 -- engages data managers and scientists in the Ocean-Observing community to advance their understanding and application of various OGC specifications, solidify demonstrations for Ocean Science application areas, harden software implementations, and produce candidate OGC Best Practices documents that can be used to inform the broader ocean-observing community. Because of the nature of SOS requests, requests for data MUST include constraints for the longitude, latitude, time, and/or station_id variables. Initiators: SURA (lead), Texas A&M University, MBARI, GoMOOS and Unidata. Specific goals: * Compare Sensor Observation Service (SOS) from the OGC s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative to the Web Feature Service (WFS) as applied to ocean data in a variety of data formats including text files, netCDF files, relational databases, and possibly native sensor output; (see Experiment #1 for details) * Make use of semantic mediation via Semantic Web technologies to allow plurality of identification for source types (platforms and sensors) and phenomena types; * Test aggregation services and caching strategies to provide efficient queries; * Explore possible enhancements of THREDDS server, so that THREDDS resident data sources might be made available via SOS or WFS;