Re: [bufrtables] Summary report on the suitability of GRIB/BUFR for archiving data

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On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 12:10:31PM -0700, John Caron wrote:

> Apologies for the long hiatus on this list.
> 
> I have written a  brief report about BUFR/GRIB with a (possibly
> controversial) recommendation. Feel free to forward to anyone who
> might be interested.
> 
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/caron/bufr/Summary.html

Hello,

from the experience[1][2][3] I have with BUFR messages, I see a few
problems with your proposal:

 1. it would imply that BUFR decoding can only happen when/where there
    is network connectivity and the central server is working. I am not
    comfortable in tying a long lived archive to the existance of a 3rd
    party server;
 2. alternatively, the archive needs to store and maintain up to date an
    entire mirror of all the tables mentioned by all the BUFRs it
    contains, and that more or less what we already have, barring the
    proposal to standardise a file format for storing tables.
    But if you retrofit the system that we have now with a standard file
    format for tables and a working central repository, you basically
    fix it without the need for hash codes;
 3. 16bits (0-65535) are imo not that big a hash space: when you allow
    everyone to create new tables at will, things may degenerate
    quickly.

But the biggest problem I have is this: you do need to maximise reuse of
BUFR table codes, otherwise the problem of making sense of the decoded
data is not machine computable anymore.

I am maintaining software that not only decodes BUFR bulletins, but also
tries to make sense of them: for example, it can understand that a given
decoded value is a temperature, that it is sampled at a given vertical
level and that it went through a given kind of statistical processing.
That is, it can decode a bulletin and say:

  "There is a temperature reading at 2 meters above ground, maximum over
  12 hours."

This interpreted information can be used by meteorologists without
having to be aware that temperatures can come as B12001, B12101, B12111,
B12112, B12114..B12119 or what else. Where I work, the possibility to do
this is considered a very valuable resource, as it allows to uniformly
compare readings from different sources.

If you have a process where data sharing across centers has to use some
well standardised, well known tables (as well as some reasonable
standards, or even just practices, for laying out BUFR templates), you
can code (I have coded) that sort of interpretation in software. If
instead anyone can at any point start distributing BUFRs that can use
any B code they want to represent temperature, then the only way to make
sense of a decoded bulletin is to have it personally read by an
experienced meteorologist.

Even if you don't want machine interpretation of the bulletins, if the
lifetime of the archive is long enough then its data can potentially
outlive the availability of experienced meteorologists who can remember
how to make sense of them.

To have a long lived archive, IMO what is needed are pervasive
standards, stable over time. Instead of designing for chaos, I'd rather
see how to make coordination work: propose a standard file format for
distributing tables; propose the creation of a repository where to
download the WMO standard table; propose a process for submission of new
table entries, akin to what happens with submissions of new code points
to UTF-8, or new locales to ISO. My feeling is that something like UTF-8
is more like the kind of thing to model BUFR tables on.

Of course chaos should still be supported, because scientists have to
have full freedom of experimentation. But there are already local table
numbers that can be used for that, and after the experiments are
successful the new entries can be submitted to a new version of the
shared tables, so that the shared language can grow.


[1] http://www.arpa.emr.it/dettaglio_documento.asp?id=2927&idlivello=64
[2] http://www.arpa.emr.it/dettaglio_documento.asp?id=514&idlivello=64
[3] http://www.arpa.emr.it/dettaglio_documento.asp?id=1172&idlivello=64

Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>



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