Re: [guppi-list] Guppi as a mime-type handler

["Steven G. Johnson" <stevenj MIT EDU>]

Note, by the way, that the license of NetCDF
(http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/copyright.html) is
incompatible with the GPL due to the fact that it contains an
"advertising clause" restriction not permitted by the GPL (see also
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html).  There are ways to resolve
this sort of thing: an explicit license exception for NetCDF, for
example, or placing certain portions of Guppi under the LGPL, or...

As an alternative standard rich format for scientific datasets, I
highly recommend HDF5 (hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu), which is under a GPL
compatible license.  It allows a very rich filesystem-like structure
with various datatypes in multidimensional arrays and arbitrary
metadata tags attached to any object.

I did look at adding HDF5 support to Guppi a long time ago, but at the
time there was no documentation for this sort of thing, and it also
looked like one would need to write a lot of GUI components in
addition to data import (to allow the user to select which dataset in
the HDF5 file to import, etcetera).  Has the situation changed?

(Alternatively, there are simple utilities to extract HDF5 datasets as
e.g. comma-delimited text, so one could use those to import into Guppi
at the expense of an extra step...but also at the expense of
discarding any metadata you might have stored in the HDF5 file.)

Steven