Re: use case: NetCDF data

Sorry trying to keep the gates of hell open a bit still. :-)   I think
I'm on board.

Instead of "tabular text files", I'd prefer to view the constraint as
"tabular text data"

>From a LOD perspective a given NetCDF resource could be accessible:
    *  in its native format
    * expressed in its text form through the ncdump utility.

The Native NetCDF form provides the scientific community self describing data.
The text form could be used to within the CSVW context as a means for
Star 4 and Star 5 discovery.

There are lots of scientific binary formats out there that represent
n-dimensional data blocks but each usually provide a means to dump in
a textual form or be expressed in an alternative format that can be
loaded into a spreadsheet for analysis.

Its somewhat of a similar concept as thinking of a relational database
table or triple store dumped in a tabular form.

Sound okay?

Eric



On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 1:05 AM, Stasinos Konstantopoulos
<konstant@iit.demokritos.gr> wrote:
> On 26 February 2014 10:40, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 25 Feb 2014, at 23:18 , Tandy, Jeremy <jeremy.tandy@metoffice.gov.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Stasinos ... thanks for the use cases you've provided so far.
>>>
>>> Looking at your NetCDF data use case, I wonder if non-textual tabular data is in scope. The discussion on the "Scoping Question" thread in the mailing list seemed to suggest that we would focus on textual tabular data.
>>>
>>> Before progressing, I wanted to get your thoughts and gather input from the other WG participants.
>>
>> Well... I did not know NetCDF before, so I peeked around a bit. I may have missed some details, but the impression is that this is, primarily, a set of utilities in various programming languages to handle tabular data that is in some internal format. They do have some ways of dumping data in terms of text:
>>
>> http://www.narccap.ucar.edu/data/ascii-howto.html
>>
>> and, as far as I could see some of the examples there the output is 'simply' CSV (well, probably TSV or 'SSV', ie, 'space separated values').
>>
>> I would support Jeremy's formulation, that we focus on 'textual tabular data'.
>
> That's alright, and it will keep hell's gates slightly less widely
> open. We still have Eric's examples of metadata headers.
>
> NetCDF also forsees a single metadata description covering multiple
> data files, but I believe this to be a more general concern as there
> are many instances of homogeneous CSV data files that can better be
> described at one shot.
>
> Best,
> s
>

Received on Wednesday, 26 February 2014 10:25:42 UTC