25 April 2012
Unidata Users Committee GRIB recommendations for WMO consideration
25 April 2012
DAP4 Commentary: DAP4 On-The-Wire Format
08 April 2012
The C++ libdap library uses what I will call an "eager" evaluation method. By this I mean that the whole packet is processed when received, is decomposed into its constituent parts (e.g. data arrays, sequence records, etc) and those parts are used to annotate the parsed DDS.
[Read More]netCDF Identifiers and Character Escape Mechanisms (sigh!)
04 April 2012
More and more, the netCDF API is being used as wrapper for a wide variety of other formats: HD5, HDF4, GRIB, BUFR, DAP2, DAP4, etc. During the process of defining translations to/from netCDF and these other format, it is necessary to implicitly or explicitly define netCDF identifiers from the schemas of these other formats.
The canonical example is HDF5. In HDF5, many API functions take a path, which is a sequence of identifiers separated by '/'. A path may be absolute ("/g1/g2/x") or relative ("y"). It appears to be the case that there is no way in HDF5 to specify an identifier containing '/', such cases are always interpreted as paths. So, if one naively defined, thru the netcdf-4 API, a variable named "/x/y", there is no apparent way to actually get this defined properly in HDF5. It is this fact that has led to the current, IMO undesirable, restriction that netCDF identifiers may not contain '/'.
This kind of "super-escaping" is very hard because in the worst case, we are likely to encounter the situation where legal identifier characters are restricted to something like the alphanumerics plus underscore.