Write API for 'splice and dice' tool (WPS)

[sarahrichmond]

Allow users to subset a data file to a given geographic region.

Similar to https://github.com/bird-house/flyingpigeon/blob/master/flyingpigeon/processes/wps_subset_countries.py

• Add ability to subset by regions in Aust (can use the ones we have in BCCVL, i.e. State, IBRA, Catchment, Local Government Area etc. These are fetched from ALA).

[manhinli]

Progress so far:

• got PyWPS (and other example) platform going
• in the progress of working through issues with own API

Have hit a number of issues with PyWPS which I've discussed with @gweis as well:

• mysterious UTF-8 encoding processing issue which I'm currently guessing is in PyWPS, but somehow works in another platform running PyWPS...
• debugging has been a pain because of the way PyWPS sets up processes/jobs, so usual techniques for debugging isn't effective
• PyWPS code itself may need changes to fit with our infrastructure setup and also for compatibility with more recent versions of Python 3.x

I'll be putting this aside temporarily to work on other things, and will return after more thorough investigation and discussion on what to do.

[manhinli]

Progress made last week with the establishment of a demonstration WPS server, with a NetCDF-compatible spatial subsetting process included.

Will review over the work, and also build up a notebook to demonstrate usage as suggested in meeting on Wednesday.

[manhinli]

This is effectively done and is currently hosted on a demo WPS server. There are two versions: spatial_subset_netcdf and spatial_subset_geotiff which accept NetCDF and GeoTIFF files respectively, along with a shapefile for subsetting/clipping/masking.

Example notebooks have also been created in Jupyter/Python and demonstrated.