Speaker
Description
The original ISTP metadata recommendations for heliophsics data sets represented as CDF files have been widely adopted by many heliophysics data providers. Without such guidelines, it would be nearly impossible to build software products like SPEDAS or PySPEDAS, which can ingest data from a wide variety of providers and instrumentation and use the same analysis and visualization tools to work with it.
The ISTP guidelines left significant room for interpretation by data providers. Many data sets are not fully compliant in various ways. Some data sets that are similar in theory can be represented differently by different providers. Our experience with SPEDAS and PySPEDAS is that a truly generic ISTP CDF reader is not yet (and may never be) possible: there will always need to be special cases and exceptions to handle the full range of metadata constructs that are already out "in the wild".
We will present a selection of situations we've encountered during the development of SPEDAS and PySPEDAS, and some lessons learned that we can apply to the next generation of heliophysics metadata standards currently being developed.