EarthCube IA: Advancing netCDF-CF for the Geoscience Community

为了使科学数据的收集对多个独立的研究小组有用，收集必须包含辅助信息，描述数据是在哪里和如何收集的，使用的测量单位和其他类似的细节。这种被称为“元数据”的辅助信息对于科学家理解数据所捕获的物理量和导出量至关重要。 目前，天气预报员、气候科学家和遥感研究人员广泛使用netCDF（netCDF-CF）的气候和预报（CF）元数据约定，以便将元数据沿着纳入科学数据，并且已经开发了许多开源和商业软件工具来探索和分析使用这些约定的数据集。该项目将努力扩展现有的元数据惯例，以扩大其数据可以表示的地球科学领域的范围。 通过扩大既定惯例的适用性，这一努力旨在将其益处扩展到相关的地球科学领域，并减少科学家必须花费的解码和重新格式化其他研究小组创建的数据集的工作量。这反过来又会给研究人员留下更多的时间进行分析，从而更好地理解数据描述的物理过程。NetCDF-CF是一个社区开发的标准，于2003年首次发布。该标准最初设计用于表示以netCDF二进制格式编码的气候和预测模型输出，其具体目标是促进不同模型输出的比较，该标准现在被气候，天气和遥感研究社区广泛接受，但在其他地球科学领域较少。该项目将扩展该标准，以更好地表示数据集的空间范围，并涵盖目前公约未涵盖的地球科学数据集，包括雷达和更复杂的卫星数据。此外，该项目将努力使netCDF-CF与自最初创建公约以来开发的现代数据结构中存储的数据兼容。由于netCDF-CF是一个基于社区的标准，方法是将现有CF社区的利益相关者与CF可以逻辑扩展的领域的专家聚集在一起，以便他们可以共同设计和原型化一系列增强功能，这些增强功能将提交给更大的社区供考虑。设想的改进将帮助不同的研究小组使用约定忠实地表示他们的数据格式使用标准的，广泛可用的软件工具。 这种类型的跨域数据互操作性有可能为广泛的社区带来更有效的综合决策工具。

For a collection of scientific data to be useful to multiple independent research groups, the collection must contain auxiliary information that describes where and how the data were collected, the units of measurement used, and other similar details. This auxiliary information, known as "metadata," is crucial to allowing scientists to understand the physical and derived quantities captured by the data. The Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions for netCDF (netCDF-CF) are currently used widely by weather forecasters, climate scientists, and remote-sensing researchers to include metadata along with scientific data, and numerous open source and commercial software tools have been developed to explore and analyze data sets that use the conventions. This project will work to extend the existing metadata conventions in ways that will broaden the range of earth science domains whose data can be represented. By broadening the applicability of an established convention, this effort seeks to extend its benefits to related earth science domains and reduce the amount of effort scientists must expend decoding and reformatting datasets created by other research groups. This, in turn, will leave researchers more time for analysis, leading to a better understanding of the physical processes the data describe.NetCDF-CF is a community-developed standard first released in 2003. Originally designed to represent climate and forecast model output encoded in the netCDF binary format, with the specific goal of facilitating comparison of output from different models, the standard is now widely accepted in the climate, weather, and remote-sensing research communities, but less so in other earth science domains. This project will extend the standard to better represent a data set's spatial extents, and to encompass earth science data sets not currently covered by the conventions, including radar and more complex satellite data. Additionally, the project will work to make netCDF-CF compatible with data stored in modern data structures developed since the original creation of the conventions. Since netCDF-CF is a community-based standard, the approach will be to bring stakeholders from the existing CF community together with experts from domains into which CF can logically be extended so they can work together to design and prototype a series of enhancements, which will be submitted to the larger community for consideration. The envisioned improvements will help diverse research groups use the conventions to faithfully represent their data in formats accessible using standard, widely-available software tools. This type of cross-domain data interoperability has the potential to give rise to more effective, integrated decisionmaking tools for a wide range of communities.