Hierarchical Data Format

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The Hierarchical Data Format, abbreviated HDF, HDF4, or HDF5 is a data format for efficient and flexible storage of measured data, intermediate and final results, especially for large amounts of data.

HDF was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA ), which provides the software libraries to use the HDF. To be able to continue processing data generated on a supercomputer offline, it has been ported to all major operating systems. HDF is the prescribed data format for data products from NASA's Earth Observing System.

HDF is very flexible and supports among others the following ( relevant ) data structures:

Specifically, the annotation represented a significant advance HDFs to other data formats, as this each record and each element can be provided with a description. This description could be for example, an axis of a Scientific Data Set the unit (eg ' degrees latitude' or ' mm ') of the axis and / or the measured values ​​( eg ' degrees Fahrenheit ' or ' mv '). Also, there is provided a general description preceded by the data or images. Some programs store from the processing history (history) to make the status of the data comprehensible. Overall, the metadata is thus part of the record and is no longer lost on a transport.

Since version HDF4.0 (1995 ) there is a netCDF interface for HDF, bringing the two most important scientific data formats have been merged.

To some limitations of the HDF to escape, the NCSA has developed the format HDF5, but which is not intended as a general replacement of the older format. The new version 4 of netCDF is installed in future in HDF5.