Container Format - RDA-sUAS-Data-IG/sUASData GitHub Wiki

in situ measurements

Proposal: Follow the underwater glider community and utilise netCDF with custom conventions (Join the discussion)

Advantages of netCDF

• Independent of computer architecture - hassle-free sharing between platforms
• Self-describing - ancillary information and metadata can be included in the same file as the data
• Flexible - can hold arbitrarily large arrays (netCDF-4) with an arbitrary number of dimensions (scalars are treated as 0-dimensional arrays)

NetCDF-4

There are three versions of the netCDF file format: netCDF classic, netCDF with 64bit-offset and netCDF-4. The latest version, netCDF-4, has been released in 2008 and provides a bunch of advantages over the earlier formats (virtually unlimited size of variables, transparent compression, support for non-rectangular arrays through multiple unlimited dimensions etc.). NetCDF-4 is therefore proposed as the preferred container format for sUAS data.

Remote and proximal sensing

The data generated by a remote sensing device often has the form of a series of images. These can be stored as multidimensional arrays in a single file (e.g. a netCDF file), but maybe a collection of files in a more traditional format such as TIFF plus a file containing metadata and additional non-image data would be much more practical?

Open an issue to kickstart the discussion