Public Comment sought on draft Zarr Storage Specification 2.0 OGC Community Standard

Zarr is an open-source specification for the storage of multi-dimensional arrays of data (also known as data cubes, N-dimensional arrays, ND-arrays, or tensors). Such arrays are ubiquitous in scientific research and engineering.

Zarr stores metadata using .json text files and array data as (optionally) compressed binary chunks. Zarr can store data into most storage systems, including databases, standard ‘directory based’ file systems, and cloud object stores, such as Amazon S3. This flexibility allows implementations to experiment with novel storage technologies while maintaining a uniform API for downstream libraries and users.

Zarr arose in genomics research in 2016. It was created by Alistair Miles of Oxford University as a library optimized for massively parallel array analytics. It has since grown into a community project with a range of developers and users from fields such as genomics, bioimaging, astronomy, physics, quantitative finance, oceanography, atmospheric science, climate science, and geospatial imaging.