Hi Lulin, > I used NetCDF sometimes ago. I understood that the NetCDF is very good > for gridded array style data. Now we have a project which mainly deals > with meta data. The data are discrete. All data are represented as > strings. The data are like catalog style. Will NetCDF store those kind > data easily and efficiently? Does NetCDF have Java Interface to handle > those kind data? The newer netCDF-4 data model has support for a "string" data type, so would be better than the older netCDF-3 "classic" data model, which uses character arrays instead of real variable-length strings. So, for example, with the netCDF-4 data model, you could store an array of strings of different lengths in a single netCDF variable. There are some conventions for storing discrete observational data using netCDF-3, but you would need to decide whether those conventions are adequate for your data: http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/documents/cf-conventions/1.6/ch09.html On the other hand, the enhanced netCDF-4 data model is not yet as well supported by other third-party software for analysis and visualization as the netCDF-3 classic data model, so there are tradeoffs. Also, depending on what you want to do with the data, you may find that netCDF provides relatively low-level support for some operations with strings. For example, the library doesn't support efficient content-based indexing or searching in large volumes of string data. There is a netCDF-Java library, which adds more support for coordinate systems and other formats than the C-based netCDF libraries: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/ --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: PFR-895418 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Normal Status: Closed
NOTE: All email exchanges with Unidata User Support are recorded in the Unidata inquiry tracking system and then made publicly available through the web. If you do not want to have your interactions made available in this way, you must let us know in each email you send to us.