[ESP] Invitation to next ESP Meeting

[Jonathan Gregory]

Dear Glenn

When discussing file formats (such as netCDF) and metadata standards (such
as CF) it may be helpful to distinguish the two of them. Most of CF is more
abstract than netCDF file format and can equally well apply to other kinds of
file that could contain metadata, such as xml (hence its relevance to cdml
and ncml). For interoperability it is very helpful to adopt a common metadata
standard, regardless of file format. So long as the different file formats
used can contain the metadata concepts and support the same ideas of data
organisation, translation between them should be relatively straightforward.
That reduces the need to adopt a common file format, which may be more
difficult to agree on.

Best wishes

Jonathan