[CF-metadata] Request for standard_name="sea_binary_mask"

From: John Caron <caron>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:15:15 -0700

Hi Chris:

On 1/4/2011 10:23 AM, Christopher Barker wrote:
> OOPs, I forgot to send this yesterday, but some of it is still relevant:
>
> On 1/3/11 11:35 AM, Rich Signell wrote:
>
>> And since many tool developers use NetCDF-Java
>
> So exactly how much does NetCDF-Java do for you? Can I ask it for a
> land-sea mask and it will look for the multiple ways that might be
> stored and give it back to me? If so, pretty cool!

It cant do that right now, but that functionality could be provided in a
standard API, and there is a framework for implementing the API by
different dataset conventions. This idea of providing a common API is
pretty much the idea of the "Common Data Model" or CDM.

>
> This has inspired me a bit -- as Unidata has focused development
> efforts on NetCDF-JAVA, I'd like to see if I can build a Python
> wrapper for it, so that I can get all that nifty stuff from Python.
> (Maybe a C++ one, too). I don't when, if ever, I"ll get time to work
> on that, but it would be pretty nifty.

IFAIU, Python cant interact directly with Java (ie link to it). We have
an experimental project here to write a C library that communicates
across a socket to a "CDM stack" in Java, presumably much easier than
duplicating the CDM in C. One of the pieces of that project is to put a
Python layer on top of that, as a way of making it immediately useful
and to get feedback on the API. We are thinking of making Python an
important component of Unidata data access technologies (resources
permitting, etc, etc).

Feedback on this possible path is welcome.

John
Received on Tue Jan 04 2011 - 11:15:15 GMT