Dapper in-situ conventions spec available

[Ted Habermann]

Hello all,

I would certainly let the group decide how narrow or broad they want 
this specification to be and also agree that testbeds are a reasonable 
approach to exploring possibilities. I did want to correct one thing 
though. Joe and Steve both used the word "swath" in the discussion after 
I used the word "satellite". I did not use that word and would prefer 
avoiding it all together in this discussion. The dataset I am talking 
about is not a swath. It is a collection of point observations taken by 
a single platform (not important) at a bunch of different locations and 
times. They could come from a ship, a drifting buoy, an airplane, or 
could be a set of earthquake epicenters and they would look exactly like 
the dataset I am talking about.

Steve brought up the relational database model which certainly works 
very well for datasets like all of these and might be an interesting 
alternative starting point. In that case, multiple tables share 
"dimensions" which are foreign keys that relate those tables. In this 
approach, the outer sequence in Joe's model would be one table and the 
inner sequence would be another. They would be related by repeating the 
_id variable in both tables.

Ted

==== Ted Habermann ==========================
     Enterprise Data Systems Group Leader
     NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center
     V: 303.497.6472   F: 303.497.6513
     "It is difficult to get a man to understand
     something when his job depends on not
     understanding it." Upton Sinclair
==== Ted.Habermann at noaa.gov =================