What is the specification you're planning to use for the value of the
_NCProperties
attribute? We'd like to able to generate compliant netCDF4 files with
h5netcdf, which uses HDF5 directly to write netCDF4.
I guess my main request is to not assume that only netCDF-C will write
_NCProperties attributes, and to ensure that netCDF-C and the specification
are flexible enough to allow for different implementations, maybe even
hypothetical implementations not using the HDF5 libraries at all.
Thanks,
Stpehan
On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 8:32 PM, dmh@xxxxxxxx <dmh@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I am about to commit a pull request for the netcdf-c library having to
> do with identifying the provenance and format of netcdf-4 files,
> and specifically targeted at detecting netcdf-4 files from HDF5 files.
>
> This provenance consists of the following information. First, there is
> a hidden, persistent, attribute names _NCProperties. It specifies the
> library versions of the netcdf library and the hdf5 library used to
> create the file. This attribute never changes during the lifetime of the
> file (unless modified deliberately thru the hdf5 API).
>
> Second, there are two special, non-persistent, attributes that are
> computed from information already in the file.
> 1. _SuperblockVersion
> 2. _IsNetcdf4
> Non-persistence means these attributes do not actually appear in the
> file. and are computed from other info already in the file.
>
> The _SuperblockVersion attribute is a single integer giving the version
> number (currently 0-3) of the superblock in the hdf5/netcdf-4 file.
>
> The _IsNetcdf4 attribute is a single integer 0/1 indicating if the file
> has various tags indicating it was produced thru the netcdf-4 API. This
> is computed by using the HDF5 API to walk the file to look for
> attributes specific to netcdf-4. False negatives are possible for a
> small subset of netcdf-4 files, especially those not containing
> dimensions. False positives are (I think) only possible by deliberate
> modifications to an existing HDF5 file thru the HDF5 API. For files with
> the _NCProperties attribute, this attribute is redundant. For files
> created prior to the introduction of the _NCProperties attribute, this
> may be a useful indicator of the provenance of the file.
>
> These three attributes are hidden in the sense that they can only be
> accessed thru the netcdf-C api calls via the name. They have no
> attribute number and will not be counted in the number of global
> attributes in the root group.
>
> The simplest way to view these attributes is to use the -s flag to the
> ncdump command.
>
> Comments are welcome.
>
> =Dennis Heimbigner
> Unidata
>
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