HDF Conventions and Communities

HDF is used to support communities throughout the ESIP community and across many scientific disciplines. In many cases, these communities develop a set of conventions for describing their data and tools that support data access using those conventions. In Earth science the most well known community APIs are HDF-EOS and netCDF, but there are many others (BAG, KEA, ...).

The HDF Group has recently initiated several projects aimed at increasing interactions with these groups in Earth Science and beyond. The first is a technical one that involves developing machine-actionable descriptions of conventions using well known expert system tools. The second is a community engagement effort aimed at developing an active and interactive HDF community initially starting (hopefully) as an NSF Research Coordination Network. These two efforts will be described during this session.