What other data access interfaces and formats are available for scientific data?
The Scientific Data Format Information FAQ provides a somewhat dated description of other access interfaces and formats for scientific data, including CDF and HDF. A brief comparison of CDF, netCDF, and HDF is available in the CDF FAQ. Another comparison is in Jan Heijmans’ An Introduction to Distributed Visualization. John May’s book Parallel I/O for High Performance Computing includes a chapter on Scientific Data Libraries that describes netCDF and HDF5, with example source code for reading and writing files using both interfaces.
