Convention for referencing external files?

[ProsaicWildfire]

Topic for discussion

I work with a lot of remote sensing data, which often employ parallel files for pixel geolocation and sensor data (for example, VIIRS produces GMTCO/SVMXX files). Comprehensive visualization and manipulation of these data is reliant on reading from both the sensor and geolocation files simultaneously.

I am planning to add a top-level attribute to the remote sensing datasets that I produce that links each sensor file with the corresponding canonical name of the paired geolocation file, which my tools can then read to automatically pair data with geolocation and do things like draw country contours. I think this would make sense as a CF-standardized attribute to be automatically read by appropriate tooling. I am in favor of a simple attribute, notionally linked_files, that would simply store an array of filenames, that would work with the existing external_variables attribute to allow automated extraction.

My use case heavily leans on the single linked file circumstance, so it's fine to use just an array rather than a precise mapping of linked_files entries to external_variables values, but a natural extension of this idea would include that mapping.

What are the thoughts from the community?