[Rcpp-devel] prospects for NetCDF?

On Dec 16, 2016, at 8:55 PM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:

I've outlined a wishlist item for a modern Rcpp wrapper for the NetCDF library: 

https://github.com/RConsortium/wishlist/issues/3 <https://github.com/RConsortium/wishlist/issues/3>

I'd appreciate any advice from those with Rcpp expertise and knowledge of wrapping external libraries.  

Does NetCDF look particularly difficult to work with? Or, would it be reasonably straigtforward, but quite a lot of work? 

It's perhaps a bit wishful to expect anyone with those skills to offer to be involved, but it would be really helpful to at least have some thoughts - even just "that's crazy hard" or "way too easy", or anything in between. 

NetCDF is a general multi-dimensional array format, with metadata and slice-based index read - in modern forms (v4.0) it's based on HDF5. It's used for many kinds of data, but sees majority use (probably) in remote sensing and climate modelling. 

Thank you. 

Cheers, Mike. 
-- 
Dr. Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
203 Channel Highway
Kingston Tasmania 7050 Australia

Does it need to be NetCDF, or can you settle for HDF5?  There are a couple
of HDF5 packages available.

On Dec 16, 2016, at 8:55 PM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:

I've outlined a wishlist item for a modern Rcpp wrapper for the NetCDF
library:

https://github.com/RConsortium/wishlist/issues/3

I'd appreciate any advice from those with Rcpp expertise and knowledge of
wrapping external libraries.

Does NetCDF look particularly difficult to work with? Or, would it be
reasonably straigtforward, but quite a lot of work?

It's perhaps a bit wishful to expect anyone with those skills to offer to
be involved, but it would be really helpful to at least have some thoughts
- even just "that's crazy hard" or "way too easy", or anything in between.

NetCDF is a general multi-dimensional array format, with metadata and
slice-based index read - in modern forms (v4.0) it's based on HDF5. It's
used for many kinds of data, but sees majority use (probably) in remote
sensing and climate modelling.

Thank you.

Cheers, Mike.
--
Dr. Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
203 Channel Highway
Kingston Tasmania 7050 Australia

On Sat, 17 Dec 2016 at 13:34 Sean Davis <seandavi at gmail.com> wrote:

Does it need to be NetCDF, or can you settle for HDF5?  There are a couple
of HDF5 packages available.


I find HDF5 is way too raw, so you're always writing abstractions from
scratch  - but that might be the best way. I haven't seen an HDF5 R package
that was suitable for the range of inputs yet.

wishlist for HDF5 that was generally applicable, to the NetCDF4 model and
others (libkea comes to mind).

Either way experiences with Rcpp and HDF5 or NetCDF are welcome.

Thanks, Mike.

On Dec 16, 2016, at 8:55 PM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:

I've outlined a wishlist item for a modern Rcpp wrapper for the NetCDF
library:

https://github.com/RConsortium/wishlist/issues/3

I'd appreciate any advice from those with Rcpp expertise and knowledge of
wrapping external libraries.

Does NetCDF look particularly difficult to work with? Or, would it be
reasonably straigtforward, but quite a lot of work?

It's perhaps a bit wishful to expect anyone with those skills to offer to
be involved, but it would be really helpful to at least have some thoughts
- even just "that's crazy hard" or "way too easy", or anything in between.

NetCDF is a general multi-dimensional array format, with metadata and
slice-based index read - in modern forms (v4.0) it's based on HDF5. It's
used for many kinds of data, but sees majority use (probably) in remote
sensing and climate modelling.

Thank you.

Cheers, Mike.
--
Dr. Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
203 Channel Highway
Kingston Tasmania 7050 Australia