Hi Janko,
> There was a shallow rumour here, that netcdf will not longer be
> supported by unidata. Is this true, are there any dates?
It's not true, we continue to maintain and support netCDF, and we have
recently submitted a proposal to get resources for the development of
netCDF-4. But I'm glad for the opportunity to update our netCDF plans
in response to this rumor.
We announced a beta test version of netCDF 3.5 in September 1999, and
the RELEASE_NOTES detailing the bug fixes and enhancements included
with netCDF 3.5 are available from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/release-notes-3.5beta2.html
Before creating the final release candidate for netCDF 3.5, I'm hoping
to include one more major addition, an experimental Fortran 90
interface contributed by Robert Pincus of the University of Wisconsin.
This is available now as a separate package from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/f90/
This interface represents quite a simplification for Fortran users of
netCDF, using Fortran 90's overloading and optional argument features
to replace 110 functions in the Fortran 77 interface with only 31
functions in the Fortran 90 interface! The web page cited above also
has links to a new NetCDF User's Guide for Fortran 90.
We also have ambitious plans for netCDF-4 and have submitted a
proposal to NSF to seek additional resources for this development:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/itr/
> If that's not true I apologize for making noise,
No problem, I'm glad you asked about support, because there may be a
change in support policies in the next year. In the past we have
always tried to answer netCDF-related email sent to
"support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", whether from the core Unidata community of
researchers and educators in the atmospheric sciences, from netCDF
users in other disciplines, or from users in the commercial sector.
More than 3400 replies to netCDF support questions are indexed by the
glimpse search engine and accessible from the bottom of the netCDF
home page.
Although we value the bug reports and suggestions that netCDF users
have sent us, we don't want to sacrifice further development to a
growing netCDF support load. So for netCDF, we may try to establish
a two tier support system, where questions from the core Unidata
community get quick responses, but other netCDF questions are
forwarded to a new mailing list, "netcdfsupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", to
see if other volunteer subscribers on that list can provide an answer
first.
> Than another question. Is someone working at a XML mapping for
> netcdf, or does someone know of a more general XML mapping for
> scientific data , besides XSIL, which could be used with netcdf data?
One way to get an answer to this question is to follow these links to
the indexed support email search page
NetCDF home page:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/
netCDF support email archive:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpsedocs/ghnetcdf.html
then enter "xml" as a keyword, to get a page of links, including
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpse/netcdf/3674
to find out there is software available for producing XML instead of
CDL from a netCDF file, using an ncxdump utility developed by Bear
Giles that is analogous to ncdump. A proposed DTD for this netCDF XML
representation is available in the package referred to there, or
separately from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/dtd/
Thanks for pointing out XSIL <http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/XSIL/>. It
looks quite promising, and may represent the future for scientific
data access.
--Russ
_____________________________________________________________________
Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program
russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.unidata.ucar.edu
