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I see (on Wikipedia) that the NetCDF format evolved from a specification for storing multidimensional data called the "Common Data Format".

Semantically... the word "network" has a very clear meaning to me in that a graph of some sort is implied, or that the format specifically is designed for use over a computer network, etc.

What is the origin of word "network" in the NetCDF format?

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    One might speculate that graph is intended from This constitutes a dependency graph as shown in Figure 1, where the dark green boxes represent the initial targets for standardization and light green are the next targets ref CF-netCDF Core and Extensions Primer
    – nmtoken
    Commented May 10, 2022 at 13:10
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    Possibly worth asking the OGC NetCDF SWG mailing list ~ see ogc.org/projects/groups/netcdfswg
    – nmtoken
    Commented May 10, 2022 at 13:18
  • Looking at the CF-netCDF Core and Extensions Primer (linked above). I think the dependency graph mentioned refers to extension features that depend on other extension features. This seems quite complicated to me, since if I were to attempt to create a .nc file then I would have to take into account the extension features dependency graph (and I haven't heard of tools that do this automatically). Makes it seem like writing a CF compliant netCDF file is a huge undertaking.
    – Zach Smith
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 7:47
  • On this page - unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/index.html. I see that one of the goals of netCDF is to allow for subsettting of large datasets so that access of datasets is efficient over networks. I wonder if this is it...
    – Zach Smith
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 8:00
  • How does NetCDF differ from CDF
    – nmtoken
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 9:17

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There's some history of netCDF in the NetCDF User's Guide. The term "network" was intended to indicate that the data files could be shared between different types of computers across computer networks. The Network File System (NFS) was pretty new at the time and influenced the naming of netCDF. (I just checked with one of the original developers to confirm this.)

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  • I would not have guessed that - thanks.
    – Zach Smith
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 14:37

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