CF Community Workshop 2024

The CF 2024 workshop will be a four day meeting held in person at SMHI, Norrköping, Sweden, Tuesday 17th September - Friday 20th September.

The meeting will be divided into two parts:

Part I:  Engaging the cross-domain CF community to gather user needs and develop a high-level CF roadmap

When? Tuesday 17th September - Wednesday 18th September 2024

Part II:  CF development including hackathon sessions

When? Thursday 19th September - Friday 20th September 2024

Register here before 31/8!

The meeting programme is under development and details are still being added.

Meeting participants may choose to attend the first two days of the programme, the last two days, or the whole meeting, according to their own interests and availability.

Online participation will be possible for those unable to participate in person in Norrköping.

The workshop is free to attend, however, travel and accommodation costs can not be reimbursed and must be met by the participant. Further options/recommendations on accommodation in Norrköping can be found in the  Information Pack

A group picture of the hackathon participants in Santander, Spain, 2022
The hackathon participants in Santander, Spain, 2022

Event Details

Part I

The workshop will bring together participants from a broad range of CF user communities and potential users. There will be a mixture of invited speakers and presentations from the community. We encourage meeting participants to submit a title for a presentation. Oral presentations should be short (5 minutes) and give an overview of the topic. If you wish to present additional technical details, please prepare a poster to accompany your talk. Poster-only presentations are also welcome. The organising committee will create a detailed program for the workshop based on submissions received.

The aim of part I is to stimulate discussion on how the CF conventions fit into the broad landscape of data and metadata standards currently in use in the environmental sciences. The anticipated outcome is a roadmap for the development of the CF conventions and controlled vocabularies over the next 5 years aimed at maximising the usefulness of CF to a wide range of communities, enhancing interoperability with other widely used standards and encouraging participation in the CF community effort. Proceedings of Part I will be published, and the intention is to publish the roadmap in the peer reviewed literature.

Who should attend part I? The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in understanding and progressing data and metadata standards in the environmental and earth system sciences, in particular:

  • those who currently use CF but are, or expect to be, limited by what it currently offers,
  • those who have considered using CF but found some barriers to using it in their own work,
  • those who work with other environmental data standards and have an interest in developing greater interoperability with CF.

Part II

The workshop will be arranged as a series of hackathon sessions to work on specific aspects of CF development. The precise topics of the hackathon sessions will be determined by the attendees, for example, they may be based on current technical discussions in the CF GitHub organisation, or topics raised in Part I of the meeting.

Links to CF GitHub discussions:

  • General discussion topics: https://github.com/orgs/cf-convention/discussions
  • CF conventions proposals: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions
  • CF vocabularies proposals: https://github.com/cf-convention/discuss

Each hackathon session will have a chair and a rapporteur. Those leading hackathon sessions are asked to prepare a single slide to introduce the topic of their session.

Who should attend Part II? Anyone with an interest in data and metadata standards in the environmental and earth system sciences. The CF community is international and we welcome new participants at any career stage.

Information Pack

We have gathered all you need to know about how to get to Norrköping, where to stay, and general information about a visit to Sweden in an Information pack. We have made block reservations that are available to book for participants in some hotels.  

 Read the Information Pack (147 kB, pdf).

Organizing committee

Ethan Davis, NSF Unidata, UCAR, USA 
Alison Pamment, UKRI/NCAS/Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, UK 
David Hassell, NCAS/University of Reading, UK 
Daniel Lee, EUMETSAT, Germany 
Ellie Fisher, NCAS/Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, UK 
Kevin O’Brien, NOAA Affiliate, PMEL, University of Washington, USA 
Lars Bärring, Rossby Centre, SMHI, Sweden

Tuesday, 17 september 

08:00 - 09:30 Registration
09:30 - 10:30 Introduction
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 12:30 Vocabularies
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:30 Uncertainty
15:30 - 16:00 Break
16:00 - 17:30 Metadata for describing statistical processing

Wednesday, 18 september

09:00 - 10:30 Metadata requirements for new technologies
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 12:30 Interoperability & cross format issues
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:30 Cross-domain challenges and opportunities 
15:30 - 16:00 Break
16:00 - 17:30 Synthesis session
End of first part

Thursday, 19 september

09.00 - 12.30 Hackathon sessions, details TBD
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 17.30 Details TBD

Friday, 20 september

09:00 - 12.30 Continuation of hackathon sessions, details TBD
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.30 Details TBD
15:30 -16:00 Hackathon wrapup
End of workshop