Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
MST1.3
We explored good about NetCDF standardisation and show CASPAR supports it
by archiving the CF standard name list monitoring it and using POM to send
notification of changes therefore supporting the semantic integrity of the data.
NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is an interface for array-orientated data
access and a library that provides an implementation of that interface. NetCDF
is used extensively in the atmospheric and oceanic science communities. It is a
preferred file format of the British Atmospheric data centre that currently provides
access to the data. The NetCDF software was developed at the Unidata Program
Center in Boulder Colorado USA
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
. NetCDF facilitates
preservation for the following reasons
•
NetCDF is a portable, self-describing binary data format so is ideal for capture
of provenance, descriptive and semantic information.
•
NetCDF is network-transparent, meaning that it can be accessed by computers
that store integers, characters and floating-point numbers in different ways. This
provides some protection against technology obsolescence.
•
NetCDF datasets can be read and written in a number of languages, these include
C, C++, FORTRAN, IDL, Python, Perl, and Java. The spread of languages capa-
ble of reading these datasets ensures greater longevity of access because as one
language becomes obsolete the community can move to another.
•
The different language implementations are freely available from the UNIDATA
Center, and NetCDF is completely and methodically documented in UNIDATA's
NetCDF User's Guide making capture of necessary representation information a
relatively easy low cost option.
•
Several groups have defined conventions for NetCDF files, to enable the exchange
of data. BADC has adopted the Climate and Forecasting (CF) conventions for
NetCDF data and have created standard names.
CF conventions are guidelines and recommendations as to where to put informa-
tion within a NetCDF file, and they provide advice as to what type of information
you might want to include. CF conventions allow the creator of the dataset to
include information representation and preservation description information in a
structured way. Global attributes describe the general properties and origins of the
dataset capturing vital provenance and descriptive information, while local attributes
are used.
MST1.5
Archive the MST support website and carrying out an assessment of it constituent
elements and use the Registry to repository to add basic information on HTML,
Word, PDF, JPEG, PNG and PostScript to facilitate preservation of a simple static
website Much additional valuable provenance information has also been recorded in
the MST radar support website. Selected pages or the entire site could be archived
as Preservation Description Information.
