Below are a few excerpts from some insightful reviewers comments on a recent netCDF standardization proposal. Discussing issues these comments raise provides an opportunity to explore some of the tradeoffs in providing infrastructure for scientific data access.

• "A basic test for data file self-consistency, the absence of a checksum capability, prevents netCDF from being an acceptable archival format."
• "... it can be quite time consuming to read time series that are stored in a record variable in a large dataset."
• "Another issue is the limitation on variable size (even in the 64 bit offset variant) to ~4GB/record. I believe this will be problematic in the future as the size of variables (especially from model data) grows ..."
• "The netCDF convention is built to be very generic, which is great as a data format. However, as a community standard it may be overly broad. We need some additional convention/standard/guidelines on the netCDF file."
• "It is also easy for users to create NetCDF files without incorporating full metadata information inside the files. Operationally, this makes it difficult for archival and distribution."
• "In practice, netCDF depends on community conventions to be completely useful. For example, the use of coordinate variables is a convention, rather than being in the specification. I do think this is a weakness of the standard - newcomers will not infrequently create netCDF files thorough the API that are essentially "unusable" because they conform to the library API but not to the community conventions."

2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Formats and Performance