Should I convert my data to the HDF or netCDF format? What tools are available?
A 2: Although you don’t need to have your data in one of these formats to use Slicer Dicer, they do offer convenience advantages. They are designed to be general-purpose formats appropriate for many scientific applications. The key advantages are cross-platform portability (e.g., data written on a supercomputer is readable on a PC) and self-description. The latter means that useful information about the data, often referred to as metadata, is stored with the data. Slicer Dicer will detect and read the metadata and set up coordinates and import transformations automatically. The user can concentrate on data interpretation, not file bookkeeping details. C and Fortran libraries and utilities for dealing with these formats are available for all commonly used platforms. Support is provided on the Web at the NCSA HDF and Unidata sites. Of course if you have data in any one of several other standard formats supported by Slicer Dicer (e.g., DICOM, Analyze 7.5, Surfer Grid, TIFF, JPG, BMP, etc.
