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On Aug 24, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Steve Hankin wrote:NetCDF (& associated tooling) is arguably emerging as the definitive standard for interchange of 3-dimensional, time- dependent fluid earth system datasets.
For the members of the NetCDF community who favor this argument, may I point out there are other communities that say similar things about their solutions? And I'm not referring to OGC, which to my knowledge has never pitched SWE (or anything else) as a straight replacement for NetCDF, notwithstanding Alex's claims for SWE's representational capabilities. I mean, it's not like apples and zebras, but the two seem really different to me.
I like NetCDF for a lot of things, including many-dimensional and time- dependent data representations. But terms like "definitive standard" carry their own hyperbolic weight, especially in a world of multiple standard bodies and many different kinds of system requirements.
So it seems to me there will not be *a* winner, either in this argument or in the earth science data management community's choice of technologies. Thus, I'm much more interested in understanding the characteristics of each, so as to use them well and maybe even improve them. (Hmm, I suppose that would explain my project affiliation....)
John --------------- John Graybeal Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org graybeal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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