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It is not enough to collect the data and produce data products. In order to be useful the data has to be used. To facilitate data use eventually a search interface has to be developed, probably many. And those interfaces can only be as good as the metadata they have to work with. HDF is not so much a data format as a file format that packages the data with the metadata, so facilitating data access by providing adequate and appropriate metadata starts with data production.
In many areas this is not much of a challenge. The temporal coverage of the granules is generally well known, channel and derived parameter names are generally just a matter of convention, etc. But spatial coverage can vary quite a bit, especially for remotely sensed data, and can often be problematic. This paper goes through the five most common spatial types (point, grid, tile, scene, and swath) discusses the problems associated with each, and makes some recommendations for the metadata that needs to be included with the data to facilitate fast, efficient, accurate search when the time comes.
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