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Re: 19990201: XML and netCDF

>From: Jim Secan <address@hidden>
>Subject: XML and netCDF
>Organization: Northwest Research Assoc., Inc
>Keywords: 199902012315.QAA15376 netCDF XML

Hi Jim,

> Before I query the mailing list I though I'd ask here first.  Are there any
> projects or plans afoot that you are aware of to provide a library that
> will generate Extensible Markup Language (XML) records/documents from the
> metadata stored in netCDF files?  Preferably in Java, but any language
> would be of interest.  I didn't find any reference to XML in the pages on
> the netCDF site (at least not on the ones I looked at).

I'm interested in this, but you're right, it's not in any netCDF web
documents.  I made a presentation last summer on metadata, XML, and
RDF in which I constructed a simple example of representing the
"Dublin Core" metadata for a netCDF file file using RDF, which is
represented using XML.  It's under the link "RDF for RUC model
metadata" in:

  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/russ/bs/metadata/

I haven't gotten back to this, but I still think it's a useful idea.

But it would also be useful to have all the dimension, variable, and
attribute names as well as variable shapes and attribute values
represented as XML rather than CDL, with something like an "ncdump"
utility that outputs XML instead of CDL.  If you have ideas of what
the DTD should look like for this, or just an example of a DTD-less
representation, we'd be interested.

This is may be pretty easy to do in Java now, for example by adding a
toXML() method to some of the ucar.netcdf classes.

With all the XML support in things like Sun's Project X and the IBM
XML stuff available, this may be a good time to create something like
this.  If you decide to ask about it on the netcdfgroup mailing list,
I'll be interested to see if anyone else has done anything.

--Russ
_____________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                         UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                     http://www.unidata.ucar.edu