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Re: info on directory/filenaming conventions

> Organization: .
> Keywords: 199502271730.AA21828

Hi Darien,

> We are starting to gather quite a bit of netcdf files of different data
> types: point, text, satellite, soon to add radar.  We were wondering if
> there had been any consideration to file naming conventions or to a data
> directory structure.  How do you handle this at Unidata?  We will have the
> same types of data as you do with the WFO-Advanced system.  Thanks for any
> information you may have on these subjects.  I haven't found anything on
> the Web pages about this.

The only file naming convention we have is using the ".nc" file name
extension for netCDF files, because that's what is generated by the ncgen
utility.  An older convention used ".cdf", but that caused confusion with
NASA's CDF files.

Different organizations of data directories may be useful for different
uses.  We have seen university departments and institutions that favored
organizing data files in at least the following ways:

 - by product type 
 - by region 
 - by time 
 - by type of data files 
 - by a combination of the above, for example 
   product-type/region/day-of-month/hour-of-day/ 

How data should be organized may be dictated by applications.  For example,
WXP puts part of product ID in file name, and part in the directory path.

Unidata's directory structure grew without much planning.  It's just an
example, and is certainly not "meteorologically correct", so I hesitate to
offer it as an example to anyone.

--Russ

______________________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                                UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                                          P.O. Box 3000
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/                          Boulder, CO 80307-3000
______________________________________________________________________________