Learning from 25 years of the extensible N-Dimensional Data Format
  The extensible N-Dimensional Data Format (NDF) was designed and developed in the late 1980s to provide a data model suitable for use in a variety of astronomy data processing applications supported by the UK Starlink Project. Starlink applications were used extensively, primarily in the UK astronomical community, and form the basis of a number of advanced data reduction pipelines today. This paper provides an overview of the historical drivers for the development of NDF and the lessons learned from using a defined hierarchical data model for many years in data reduction software, data pipelines and in data acquisition systems. 
Tim Jenness, David S. Berry, Malcolm J. Currie, Peter W. Draper,   Frossie Economou, Norman Gray, Brian McIlwrath, Keith Sho...
astro-ph.IM