August 22, 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership seeks comments on an OGC candidate standard, the CF-netCDF Data Model extension to the existing OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard version 1.0. 

The CF-netCDF Data Model is a flexible data model widely used in climate and weather forecast systems as well as for other types of environmental data. The candidate CF-netCDF Data Model extension to the existing OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard version 1.0 is the latest step in establishing CF-netCDF as an OGC standard for binary encoding.  This will enable standard delivery of data in binary form via several OGC service interface standards.

The OGC netCDF encoding supports electronic encoding of geospatial data, specifically digital geospatial information representing space- and time-varying phenomena. NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is widely used internationally to communicate and store many kinds of multidimensional data, although it was originally developed for the Earth science community.  The netCDF data model is particularly well suited to providing data in forms familiar to atmospheric and oceanic scientists: namely, as sets of related arrays.

The conventions for climate and forecast (CF) metadata are designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created with the netCDF API.  The conventions define metadata that provide a definitive description of what the data in each variable represents, and the spatial and temporal properties of the data. This enables users of data from different sources to decide which quantities are comparable, and facilitates building applications with powerful extraction, regridding, and display capabilities.

NetCDF was developed and is maintained and actively supported by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) ( www.ucar.edu). UCAR and other OGC members introduced the first netCDF specification as a candidate OGC standard to encourage broader international use and greater interoperability among clients and servers interchanging data in binary form.

The candidate CF-netCDF Data Model extension to the existing OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard version 1.0 and information about submitting comments on this document are available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/90. The public comment period closes on September 21, 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 460 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.