[CF-metadata] GIS versus CF conventions

[John Caron]

Hi Jonathan:

Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful response.

I'd say that CF is a victim of its own success, in that people want to use it beyong its original 
"use cases". Generally model output is large, with lots of 4D fields, so adding an 2 extra 2D fields 
is minor. The Galeon project wants to use netcdf within WCS server, where typically the request is 
for a single 2D field.

I would propose some standardized "CF variants", or profiles, to be worked out by subgroups that 
need variations from the standard, rather than modifying the base standard. The groups should have a 
clearly stated target or purpose, perhaps as narrow as "WCS" or as broad as "GIS".

Regards,

John

Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> Dear John
> 
> The coordinate information is there so that the data can be used by any
> software without having to be able to interpret a higher-level (but more
> compact) grid description. Even though we may add map projections etc. to CF,
> applications might not support them and if they don't the data is useless.
> The basic question is not how to change the standard, but whether to change
> it, I think. Obviously it is easy to omit the coordinate information, but
> the consequence is that the data will not be usable by the majority of
> applications (I suspect). What criteria could be used to decide whether this
> would be the right choice to make?
> 
> If there are many such fields, perhaps the coordinate information could be
> sent in a separate file, just once. This is not CF-compliant, strictly
> speaking, but data-reading software may be able to aggregate many files into
> one dataset, like cdms can do.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Jonathan
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