Hi Jonathan, Steve, et al:

Question:

Do we use "cross referencing variables" just in the "coordinates" attribute or are there other places?

Comment:

Not having the files explicitly named means that the collection of files is defined externally. NcML does this, as apparently does the cdms cdscan utilility, and im sure lots more. These external systems that define collections may have semantics about variable names. NcML, for example, has a "union" aggregation that logically combines all variables with distinct names into a single dataset, ignoring duplicates. It also has a "join" aggregation that logically combines all variables with the same name along an "aggregation dimension", essentially concatenating them, eg for time slices.

It might be useful to do a quick survey of what existing "aggregators" do to make sure we are not inadvertently breaking some of these.
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