On 5/13/2010 1:21 PM, Hoeth, Brian R. (JSC-WS8)[NOAA] wrote:
This seems like as good a time as any to chime in ... I have always been
frustrated w/ the fact that Unidata NetCDF is not the same as AWIPS NetCDF. I
thought the whole reason to have NetCDF files is that they are a Common Data
Format (CDF). What's even more puzzling is that the folks who develop AWIPS
(GSD) work right down the road from Unidata. You would think there would be
more collaboration?
OK, enough soap boxing ... hopefully my comments haven't turned you away and
you are still reading ... what I'm mainly interested in is the future. I'd
like to make sure that the problems of the past do not repeat themselves. So,
with that said, are the IDV developers working closely (or at all?) with the
AWIPS II developers? Will IDV be able to display AWIPS II data (which is
mainly in HDF vs. NetCDF from what I understand)?
Thanks for listening! Sorry if I've offended anyone.
Brian Hoeth
NWS Spaceflight Meteorology Group
Johnson Space Center
Houston, TX
281-483-3246
The AWIPS development is a NWS mission-critical project that hasnt put
much attention into an open data architecture. However, the files are
self-contained, so we can write code to extract the coordinate information.
From Matt's comments it sounds like AWIPS-2 may be worse off in that
the files are not self contained. OTOH, I think their architecture is
more open, eg access to the database may be possible, so perhaps in some
situations we can still use those files directly, or perhaps there might
be ways to extract useable files.
Big government projects tend to get pretty insular, and unless there
are advocates of openness at all levels and phases, it seems to
typically get lost. Private contractors still try to do lock-in in
various obvious and subtle ways. Community involvement and feedback on
how our money is being spent is the only counterforce. As Patrick Henry
said: "Eternal vigilence is the price of the liberty to use your own
visualization software".
