The Open Geospatial Consortium membership has approved the Enhanced Data Model Extension to the OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard. The OGC has previously approved the netCDF Core Encoding Standard, the netCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard-netCDF Classic, and the 64-bit Offset Format. All of the OGC's netCDF standards documents are available for free download from the OGC network Common Data Forum (netCDF) standards suite page.
The netCDF enhanced data model was introduced as part of netCDF-4 in 2008. The enhanced data model added support for per-variable compression, multiple unlimited dimensions, more complex data types, and better performance by layering an enhanced netCDF access interface on top of the HDF5 format. For more on the differences between the netCDF classic data model and the netCDF enhanced data model, see this diagram.
UCAR/Unidata and other OGC members originally introduced netCDF into the OGC as a candidate OGC standard to encourage broader international use and greater interoperability among clients and servers interchanging data in binary form. Among other benefits, this will make the large collections of environmental netCDF data more readily accessible and usable by non-experts. In addition to their ongoing development of netCDF itself, Unidata Program Center staff have been working with the OGC to provide the formal specifications necessary for netCDF's adoption as an OGC standard.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.
