Hi Stephen,
I also advocate keeping support for groups simple.
The simplest support imaginable is that groups should be completely
self-contained without attribute inheritance. This would go in the
right direction, yet I think attribute inheritance, at least of global
metadata, ought to be strongly considered. Otherwise useful attributes
like "history" and "Convention" have to be stored in each group....
cz
Le 17/09/2013 04:56, stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk a ?crit :
> Bryan has beaten me to the points I would have made. I think hierarchies are over rated at the interface level. Examples abound of where they have been abandoned: hierarchal vs relational DBs, XML databases and tools (save us from xquery for Netcdf!).
>
> Under the hood hierarchies are often necessary for scalability and we all use them as a crutch when no better tools exist.
>
> I would advocate keeping support for groups very simple. CF could treat any netcdf file containing groups as if it was a directory of netcdf files with attached metadata. IMO complex rules about inter-group relationships should be avoided. I guess attribute inheritance must be an exception here but I would urge caution. One of the CF data model tickets has got a detailed debate on interpretation of the current standard regarding variable attributes overriding global attributes. Lessons from that should be learned.
>
> Stephen.
>
> --
> Stephen Pascoe from iPhone
>
--
Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci.
University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'(
Received on Tue Sep 17 2013 - 14:51:19 BST
