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I understand that you don’t have time to spend in OGC however if non
of the major players are involved in the process and keep pushing
their own legacy formats instead then for sure our standards are doomed…
You know NetCDF is not the only one. The military has NITF and a bunch
of STANAG standards, meteorology people have their own, navigation has
NMEA, etc… All of them are heavily used throughout their community and
required great investments. Some of them actually deal with coverages,
ocean or atmospheric data so they do overlap with NetCDF earth science
focus. So which ones do we pick?
Its true that NetCDF is just another legacy file format. But its also
true that NetCDF is a *general-purpose* scientific data format, that is
not specific to meteorology, climate research, or any earth science
discipline. In this sense it is different from NITF or NMEA, or GRIB or
BUFR, or any domain specific format. This is an important distinction
which is both a strength and weakness for transporting binary data.
(BTW, the file format hadnt changed in 15 years, when a few years ago we
added one variation to allow sizes to exceed 2 Gb. So there are now
exactly two variations of the "netCDF classic file format". Note that im
not talking about netCDF-4/HDF5 format, which has many variants.)
None of this is all that important, as Bryan rightly point out. The hard
stuff is the semantics.
