In January 2011, the OGC Technical Committee voted to adopt the netCDF Classic as an official OGC binary encoding standard. As of the writing of this report, the final standard specifications are being formatted for final publications, but the draft standards are still available in three documents: an overview primer, the core standard spec, and the binarry encoding spec.http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/71 At the April 2011 EGU, Stefano Nativi and Ben Domenico will give a presentation on the status and plans for the ongoing CF-netCDF standardization effort. The main points of the presentation are given in the following graphic:  As the diagram shows, the next steps will be standardization of the CF conventions, in particular those associated with gridded and point (discrete sampling) data types. At the most recent OGC TC meeting, the CF-netCDF SWG strongly recommended consideration of the OGC Fast Track process for the CF conventions specification as well as for the netCDF4 binary encoding spec (which is actually based on a subset of HDF5 format). At this point, it appears that a case could be made for a Fast Track approach for the CF conventions based on the already adopted NASA standard. The OGC Fast Track process is described in There is also a pending NASA standard for the NetCDF4/HDF5 encoding The netCDF enhanced data model will be an additional undertaking as an OGC extension to the core netCDF classic data model standard, but that will not come under the Fast Track process. CollaborationsComplementing the standardization efforts, there are many projects underway in which other groups are taking on substantial portions of the work. Data discovery initiatives include
Standards-based tools development
Illustrations
Remaining ChallengesThere are several areas where decisions must be made and work remains to be done.
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