Hi Jonathan:
Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful response.
I'd say that CF is a victim of its own success, in that people want to use it beyong its original
"use cases". Generally model output is large, with lots of 4D fields, so adding an 2 extra 2D fields
is minor. The Galeon project wants to use netcdf within WCS server, where typically the request is
for a single 2D field.
I would propose some standardized "CF variants", or profiles, to be worked out by subgroups that
need variations from the standard, rather than modifying the base standard. The groups should have a
clearly stated target or purpose, perhaps as narrow as "WCS" or as broad as "GIS".
Regards,
John
Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> 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
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Received on Fri Aug 26 2005 - 09:50:57 BST
