The Loop platform is an open source 3D probabilistic geological and geophysical modelling platform, initiated by Geoscience Australia and the OneGeology consortium. The project is funded by Australian territory, State and Federal Geological Surveys, the Australian Research Council and the MinEx Collaborative Research Centre.
A Loop Project File encapsulates all the data and models used or created in a Loop workflow. This includes the ability to create meta-data which provides provenance of the data and the methodology and history of how models are used and produced. The Loop Project File is based on netCDF and has APIs for C/C++ and Python (with the intention of creating a Fortran API in the future).
There are several benefits to using a single project file. These include encapsulating the information in a single place, server storage and retrieval enabling batching of model creation over multiple servers, easily shared workflows, and storage efficiency among many more.
netCDF enables multi-dimensional data structure storage in a highly compressed format as well as data attribution for meta-data all within a single data file.
The Loop Project File python repository is under the MIT license