Scientific data formats such as NetCDF have made great strides in areas like interoperability, scalability, and data compression. By comparison, methods for representing the uncertainty inherent in the values stored in scientific data sets are less robust. A group organized by researchers from the National Research Council of Italy's Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research is trying to address this issue by creating a set of conventions for the representation of uncertainty values associated with data stored in NetCDF files.
A discussion paper describing ideas for storing uncertainty values is available, and an electronic mail list has been created to allow broad community discussion of the proposal.
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