[wg11] Information from HDF Group on EXPRESS/Binary

[David Price]

All,

I mentioned in another email that I'd been in contact with the NCSA HDF
group about our EXPRESS/Binary project's use of HDF5. The following are
notes from a phone conversation I had with them today.

Notes from Introductory Call with EXPRESS/Binary Project and NCSA HDF Team
May 16, 2005
On the call: David Price, Mike Folk, and Elena Pourmal

The EXPRESS/Binary project has produced a first draft specification of how
to use HDF5 to represent EXPRESS-driven data. Only a subset of EXPRESS is
supported in the initial draft, however it is expected that all (or at least
most) of EXPRESS will be supported in any specification submitted through
ISO TC184/SC4. The initial draft was the result of a workshop at the ISO
STEP Lillehammer meeting in March 2005. After contacting the NSCA HDF team
to inform them of the activity, David Price represented the EXPRESS/Binary
team and Mike Folk and Elena Pourmal represented the HDF team on an
introductory call.

The HDF team has had experience with/requests from some in the STEP
community for numerous years (from the mid 1990s). The various projects have
not quite reached the point of trying to get anything standardized in ISO
SC4 though. Previous EXPRESS-related efforts included the Trappist project,
see http://www.kb.bam.de/ for more information, and the HDF group suggested
that this kind efforts had influenced their development of HDF5. In the
scientific community they mentioned several HDF-using organizations that
overlap with the STEP community (e.g. NASA and Boeing). We may be able to
link the HDF experts in these organizations with their STEP experts to get
more support for the current project.

Given they already knew about STEP, the HDF team were quite happy to hear
about the current EXPRESS/Binary project and that we have support enough to
actually make an ISO standard. It turns out that they have been
investigating the standardization of HDF as well in ANSI. They support the
idea that the STEP community should standardize its use of HDF for
EXPRESS-driven data. They've already offered a bit of help to guide us in
the right direction and are open to discussions about workshops, tutorials,
standardization approaches, etc. to see how the STEP and HDF communities
might help each other.

David took the action item to work with a couple of domain experts (e.g.
Keith Hunten) to create a small example schema and dataset to demonstrate
some of the draft EXPRESS/HDF5 mapping. Once that's ready we'll have another
call to discuss the example and further possible cooperation.

Based on this initial call, it seems like there's a tremendous opportunity
for cooperation. Many thanks to Mike Folk and Elena Pourmal. I'm sure there
will be more to come.

Cheers,
David

Phone +44 2077040499