Design goals and rationale

Design Goals

• Simplicity: no extra libraries needed to use netCDF-LD in its simplest and most basic form.
• Compatibility: netCDF-LD will always be compatible with netCDF
• Terse: netCDF-LD syntax will be concise and human-readable where possible
• Equivalence as RDF: netCDF-LD elements usable as netCDF without knowing RDF, but also netCDF-LD usable as RDF. This allows a means to reference external resources and further join up with other RDF graphs and descriptions as Linked Data.

Rationale

netCDF-LD borrows and adopts *-LD patterns already established for extending existing formats (e.g. http://json-ld.org/ and https://www.w3.org/community/csvw/ formats). By aligning with these patterns and adopting Linked Data principles, netCDF-LD applications can take advantage of existing software for processing Linked Data and supporting more effective data discovery and integration across systems, and provides opportunities for reuse of netCDF data more widely. netCDF-LD also aims to enable consistency checking and validation against known conventions such as CF conventions and http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_1-3, particularly ensuring syntactic and controlled vocabulary checking.