Re: [galeon] WCS and MIME types

• To: "Bryan Lawrence" <b.n.lawrence@xxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: [galeon] WCS and MIME types
• From: "Jon Blower" <j.d.blower@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:45:23 +0100

nor is it the long term plan for CF, which has in the roadmap a clean
distinction between CF conventions and their implementation as cf-netcdf ....

I didn't realise this.  The CF website still ties the conventions
specifically to NetCDF.  But I agree that disentangling CF from NetCDF
is theoretically a good thing, although I'm not sure exactly how this
would happen since the encoding of CF attributes is often dependent
upon a NetCDF-like syntax.  Still, I'm not an expert here.

So I guess in the long term, CF-NetCDF will be more like EXIF-JPEG
(where metadata convention is separate from format) than GeoTIFF
(where the metadata convention only applies to a single format).  A
very brief Google search suggests to me that there is no specific MIME
type or parameter in common usage for EXIF-*.  It seems that people
just use image/jpeg (etc) and rely on client applications to spot the
EXIF headers.  The same could be applied to NetCDF but this would not
help much with WCS format negotiation, which was the original point of
this discussion (sorry for drifting off topic!)

Jon

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Bryan Lawrence <b.n.lawrence@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Folks

type. Thirdly, since CF is closely tied to NetCDF it could be argued
that CF implies NetCDF, meaning that "cf" in itself could be a valid
file type, but this isn't typical community usage.

nor is it the long term plan for CF, which has in the roadmap a clean
distinction between CF conventions and their implementation as cf-netcdf ....
(not I hasten to add because of any problems with netcdf, just the opposite,
to make it easier to migrate to netcdf).

This is true.  But there's no reason why there should not be a .cf
file type (or equivalent).  In fact I think this might be rather
helpful - but that's probably another discussion.  Many systems
(especially web servers and browsers) map file extensions directly to
MIME types and helper applications.

I don't think so. See above. CF should be a convention which is different from
a format.

Cheers
Bryan

• References:
  • [galeon] WCS and MIME types
    • From: Ben Domenico
  • Re: [galeon] WCS and MIME types
    • From: Dominic Lowe
  • Re: [galeon] WCS and MIME types
    • From: Jon Blower
  • Re: [galeon] WCS and MIME types
    • From: Bryan Lawrence