Re: [galeon] [WCS-2.0.swg] CF-netCDF standards initiatives

Ron Lake wrote:

Hi John:

Surely the GML encoding is going to be simpler to parse and "understand" than 
any equivalent binary encoding.

R
parsing XML is "trivial", as you point out, meaning we have lots of nice parsers that do all that for you. But "understanding" GML is non-trivial, to say the least, meaning that the semantics are quite complex, eg judging by the size of the document(s).
parsing binary netCDF is a bit harder, though again we have some nice libraries that already do it for you. Writing your own parser, however, is only a few hundred lines of code, more or less what i mean by "maximally simple".
"understanding" netCDF is much simpler than GML, as there are only 4 or 5 objects in the UML. "understanding" CF Conventions is much more complicated, of course, but arguably easier than GML, partly because the scope is much narrower.
<tangent>IMO, using XML Schema to describe a data model is really painful. although I understand why its done when you want to describe an XML language like GML (I do it myself). But I think its unfortunate, and obscures the model with the representation. </tangent>