Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
Dear all Two points about this question: (1) I agree with Ken that CF is concerned with use metadata, but that there is overlap between use and discovery metadata. If needs arise for metadata that CF does not support at present but which could go in CF, do please consider proposing extensions to CF. As you may know, we are at present trying to agree definite rules and timescales for making changes to CF, as we have not up to now had a clear procedure. I can appreciate that it is more effort to propose and argue for an extension or change to CF than it is to devise a convention within a smaller community. The discussions that ensue can definitely be hard work, but I feel that it is worthwhile and leads to a better result, and I think that the applicability of CF should be broadened as much as possible. This is because many problems do turn out to be of more general application than one might initially suspect. (2) Although a syntax could be introduced to indicate in the names of attributes which convention defines them (as John suggests), I suspect this may be too much of an "easy way out". This is rather like discussions we have had about standard names. So far we have maintained one standard name table to serve all disciplines. It is more work to choose these names but it means the names have to be clearly defined, and there is only one name for a given concept, so it helps data exchange between different user communities. If you allow conventions to have separate attribute namespaces, there is less incentive to look at other existing conventions to see whether the same issue has been addressed by someone else. The result will be the development of synonyms and mutual unintelligibility, whereas if attributes have common names across conventions, interoperability is promoted. So I think it would be good if Unidata maintained a registry of attribute names defined by known/registered netCDF conventions. This will assist in different conventions sharing attributes, such as we already do with those defined by Unidata like _FillValue and Conventions. Cheers Jonathan ============================================================================== To unsubscribe netcdfgroup, visit: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing-list-delete-form.html ==============================================================================
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