Hello everyone,
We here at NCSA (the home of HDF) are actively investigating
adding a netCDF interface to HDF. Our implementation would be a
call-compatatible superset of the existing netCDF interface.
[We are asking for funding for this initiative from
NSF as well as NASA's EOSDIS (Earth Observing System Data
Information System) project. EOSDIS is interested in 10-bit data,
among other things, so extensions to the netCDF interface will be
required].
A prototype implementation is currently being designed to
determine how HDF needs to be modified to accomodate the netCDF data
model. Our basic abstraction is to represent netCDF structures
as HDF V-Groups. It will then be possible to integrate netCDF objects
with the rest of the HDF tool suite; a user could easily associate a
24-bit raster image with a netCDF variable, for example. Such an
integration will then allow tools written for netCDF and tools
written for HDF to both interact intelligently with the new data
files.
As part of this effort, we would like to solicit information
and opinions from the netCDF community as to how they currently use
netCDF and what they would like to see expanded / improved / etc...
The recent discussions about storing a large number of small
records is a case in point. The EOSDIS project is talking about huge
data-sets as well as large numbers of moderate sized data sets, but
obivously there is a need for the efficient storage of small record
objects. We had not anticipated this need until it was brought up
in this mailing-list.
Any and all comments and opinions will be greatly appreciated.
-Chris Houck
(chouck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
