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. [JSON-LD] (http://json-ld.org/) and CSV-for-the-web formats). By aligning with these patterns and adopting Linked Data principles, netCDF-LD applications can:

• Take advantage of existing software for processing Linked Data
• Support more effective data discovery and integration across systems
• Provides opportunities for reuse of netCDF data more widely

netCDF-LD also aims to enable consistency checking and validation against known conventions such as [http://cfconventions.org/](CF conventions) and ACDD, particularly ensuring syntactic and controlled vocabulary checking.