[CF-metadata] GIS versus CF conventions

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:17:50 +0100

Dear John

The coordinate information is there so that the data can be used by any
software without having to be able to interpret a higher-level (but more
compact) grid description. Even though we may add map projections etc. to CF,
applications might not support them and if they don't the data is useless.
The basic question is not how to change the standard, but whether to change
it, I think. Obviously it is easy to omit the coordinate information, but
the consequence is that the data will not be usable by the majority of
applications (I suspect). What criteria could be used to decide whether this
would be the right choice to make?

If there are many such fields, perhaps the coordinate information could be
sent in a separate file, just once. This is not CF-compliant, strictly
speaking, but data-reading software may be able to aggregate many files into
one dataset, like cdms can do.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Fri Aug 26 2005 - 07:17:50 BST