Requirement: Proper documentation, best practices

[krischer]

Any NGF and updated StationXML requires a major update to documentation, best practice.

[chad-earthscope]

In addition to clear and concise documentation of the specification. A set of reference data, representing at least one example of each possible structure in the format and illustrating common use cases would be very valuable. A possible exception would be references for data encoded in retired encodings, should we agree to retire any. The reference data set should include records in the NGF and an equivalent human-readable format.

These reference data could be used by software developers, data center architects, equipment manufacturers, etc. for testing and development. Reference data should be available on www.fdsn.org for download.

[krischer]

The reference data should also be available in some machine readable (but not mseed) format so automated tests can be written easily. JSON would be a good candidate for that.

[jmsaurel]

The documentation should also contain clear guidelines for the affectation of SCNL to a dataset.

[krischer]

Summary

(Please let me know if I missed a point or misunderstood something)

I'm not bringing this to a vote as the unanimous consensus is that this should be done.