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Hi Lulin, > I used NetCDF sometimes ago. I understood that the NetCDF is very good > for gridded array style data. Now we have a project which mainly deals > with meta data. The data are discrete. All data are represented as > strings. The data are like catalog style. Will NetCDF store those kind > data easily and efficiently? Does NetCDF have Java Interface to handle > those kind data? The newer netCDF-4 data model has support for a "string" data type, so would be better than the older netCDF-3 "classic" data model, which uses character arrays instead of real variable-length strings. So, for example, with the netCDF-4 data model, you could store an array of strings of different lengths in a single netCDF variable. There are some conventions for storing discrete observational data using netCDF-3, but you would need to decide whether those conventions are adequate for your data: http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/documents/cf-conventions/1.6/ch09.html On the other hand, the enhanced netCDF-4 data model is not yet as well supported by other third-party software for analysis and visualization as the netCDF-3 classic data model, so there are tradeoffs. Also, depending on what you want to do with the data, you may find that netCDF provides relatively low-level support for some operations with strings. For example, the library doesn't support efficient content-based indexing or searching in large volumes of string data. There is a netCDF-Java library, which adds more support for coordinate systems and other formats than the C-based netCDF libraries: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/ --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: PFR-895418 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Normal Status: Closed