Hi Rich, As the following may convey, my familiarity with CF featureTypes is all of ~10 minutes old :) From what I gather, featureTypes give a sense of how to treat collections of related variables. One could imagine a logical extension to featureType that allowed specifying an "ensemble" as a collection of groups to be treated in a certain way.
The case for some sort of "ensemble" metadata is to provide hints. Aggregating raw CMIP5 files into groups in a single file is all well and good for a single user like me, because I know my own conventions. What I envision a CF convention providing though is more ambitious. It would tell data providers how to indicate to a non-specialist user how/if group in hierarchical group file are inter-related, e.g., different realizations of a single-model, or simulations of different models with the same initial and time-varying boundary conditions, ... The ensemble type then determines how analysis should proceed. Best, cz Le 16/09/2013 10:52, Signell, Richard a écrit : > Charlie & Co, > > Also, regardless of whether these hierarchical structures are stored > in NetCDF4 or flattened NetCDF3, we get a big boost in > interoperability when we write datasets with known featureTypes > (profile, time series collection, swath, etc), because then workflows > that have performed a > catalog search and returned dataset endpoints knows what to do. If > the dataset endpoints contain ad hoc heirarchies it will be a lot more > difficult. > > So if we create hierarchical datasets, I hope we create known > featureTypes to accompany them (like gridEnsembleStructure). > > Thanks, > Rich -- Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci. University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'( _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
