Re: NcML and FGDC

>To: address@hidden
>From: Roy Mendelssohn <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: 20030715: subject
>Organization: Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory
>Keywords: 200307150044.h6F0iULd015528

Hi Roy,

> We are working on a proposal and they require a statement of how we 
> plan to make an FGDC format data description available to NOAA.  Is 
> there any coherence between NcML and FGDC. As most of the data is 
> NetCDF, if we did an NcML  dump, would there be any easy way to 
> import this into FGDC.  Or would you know (i am cc: the developers) 
> if I had the data be served by a Live Access Server would there be an 
> easy way to make  FGDC compliant metadata available easily through 
> that?

No, sorry, as far as I know, there is no way to derive any FGDC
compliance from netCDF or NcML.  Since NcML uses XML and FGDC has an
XML variant, one approach is to write some XSLT that would generate
FGDC XML from NcML, but all the information would have to exist in the
NcML (or underlying netCDF files) to make this possible.  NcML lets
you add metadata to netCDF files without modifying the netCDF files,
so this might be a reasonable approach for adding the necessary FGDC
compliance without changing the underlying data in existing archives.

But all the accesses to the data would have to be through the NcML.
And currently, data is only accessible through NcML via Java.  To do
this from C is in our plans, but I can't estimate when it will get
worked on ...

--Russ