ABSTRACT
There are many standardised ways for such digital representations, for example, Hierarchical Data Format and netCDF. These standards designed to improve the organisation of large data repositories, often cover both low-level details for the binary encoding of the information and also higher-level definitions for the overall structure of the data. This chapter discusses the relation of a physical field to its samples to understand what data values are used to describe a field, and how they relate to the field. It presents various possible extended field representations. The chapter covers an overview of the virtual data set, which is an extended data repository suitable for a generalised modelling of continuous fields, and first-implementation approaches. The usage of a widely used protocol supports a rapid prototyping, particularly because there is a large collection of utilities and source code available. This complies with a general tendency within the software industry.
