Feature types that are largely out of scope.

[dblodgett-usgs]

Clarify that such features are essentially out of scope for this feature model?

Sources, specifically glaciers and wetlands. Section 7.4.2.5 contains a brief discusion of snowfields and glaciers. Given that meltwater from them serves as the principal water source for a significant number of people around the world, a somewhat larger discussion of them may be in order. Similarly, wetlands located in a variety of terrain positions are hugely important water resources that hold very large volumes of water. They are briefly mentioned in section 6.3. It may be worth considering “source” (or some other term?) as a hydrologic feature (Figure 24) that includes snowfields and glaciers, and perhaps wetlands as well.

[dblodgett-usgs]

Addresses an issue in #182

[dblodgett-usgs]

Also add scope note to address:

Temporal. Time is clearly relevant here, especially as one of the objectives is to support varying “... spatial and temporal representations.” Perhaps it is too detailed or seen as out of scope for this document, but a brief discussion of feature succession might be in order when remapping for example occurs. (Note though that in the temporal schema (191081S(E)2002) it is stated in section 5.5.4.2.3: “There are both spatial and temporal aspects to feature succession, in that the feature instances in the association occupy the same spatial location, at different times and in a particular order.” If a braided stream replaces a single line stream, then strictly speaking the spatial location is not the same - assuming that location is synonymous with position. Even if the new mapping involves no braids, the flowpath(s)/channel(s) may have moved.) Another notion of temporal pertains to time series, as related for example to hydrometric station data. This may also be worth mentioning, but it is a different case from the issue described above. Also different (and as discussed at the Canada-US Salt Lake City meeting) is network connectivity that differs under differing flow regimes. This is significant in many different environments and again should be noted.

and:

Feature identifiers. Perhaps this is an implementation detail. Nevertheless, a discussion of options or alternatives would be useful. For example if URLs are to be supported, then that might be of interest to state; if they are, then a statement about their preferred or expected structure would be helpful. If identifiers can be “intelligent” or “meaningless” or anything else that some organization wishes to use, then that might be worth stating, as would a comment about whether or not the identifiers can be expected to be permanent, immutable and globally unique.

[dblodgett-usgs]

The SWG agreed to these in the meeting.

[dblodgett-usgs]

Draft Responses:

1. The SWG recognizes the features the reviewer mentions as important. However, these specific features are out of the intended scope of HY_Features, their recognition in the specification should lead future work or implementations without attempting to standardize features that are intentionally out of scope. Further clarification that these features are out of scope for this specification will be added to the specification.
2. While these temporal issues are clearly important, they are purposefully out of scope for HY_Features. An implementation, or future standardization work may attempt to take on these issues. A note regarding temporal aspects of features being out of scope will be added to the specification.
3. Since HY_Features is a conceptual model, such implementation details are out of scope. A future implementation of the conceptual model would clearly need to answer questions such as these, but this is out of scope for the current specification.

[dblodgett-usgs]

Added a paragraph addressing these issues to the scope section. It's still 2 pages!