>One key problem is that technology changes quickly. Each of your plateaus of stability often need to become recognized before the next step can be taken. Wit

>One key problem is that technology changes quickly. Each of your plateaus of stability often need to become recognized before the next step can be taken. With scientific software at the end of the train, the file-type/file-system needs to be well established and more stable than any software could be, and for a lot longer than the whole scientific project itself takes. A scientific filetype needs to be well-documented (better than ordinary software) and unchanged for long enough so that all agree no further changes are intended. It needs to have already been virtually perfectly stable, for more years than most research projects are likely to have their data remain useful in the future. netcdf is in this category while still being extensible and it is very old (well established) if not well known. Public domain government "codec" which basically decompresses netcdf to structured text, and in reverse. Now this new ASDF filetype looks like it does have useful features of its own except one thing: >ASDF is under active development Which can still be a drawback in this situation.