Right now the CCHDO netCDF format is basically defined as whatever this library makes. To be good data citizens we need to document for humans what a conforming CCHDO netCDF file is and provide testing software that can say that a file is or is not valid.
Some thoughts so far:
- Conformance documentation should have citable sections.
- Conformance documentation should use RFC 2119 requirement levels.
- Conformance tester should cite and link to the relevant parts is in the Conformance documentation.
Some harder things to deal with are what could be called "provenance requirements". The netCDF standards all strongly recommend that data histories be recorded in files somehow, but aren't clear as to granularity or really how to do this. Data users however, have been very clear that we need to distinguish metadata changes (e.g. citation info added to file) from changes that affect the data themselves (e.g. data values changed, unit corrections).
Right now the CCHDO netCDF format is basically defined as whatever this library makes. To be good data citizens we need to document for humans what a conforming CCHDO netCDF file is and provide testing software that can say that a file is or is not valid.
Some thoughts so far:
Some harder things to deal with are what could be called "provenance requirements". The netCDF standards all strongly recommend that data histories be recorded in files somehow, but aren't clear as to granularity or really how to do this. Data users however, have been very clear that we need to distinguish metadata changes (e.g. citation info added to file) from changes that affect the data themselves (e.g. data values changed, unit corrections).