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Re: NCDC Datasets and COARDS Conventions

Ok heres the background:
Its a bit hard to get the udunits time values right in the aggregations, so I started using ISO date strings, and proposed that CF accept those. ISO date strings IMO are superior to udunit values for a number of reasons, but the proposal was rejected. I never got around to moving back to udunit values because, well, it wasnt that easy for reasons that arent very interesting. Since my client software (CDM) accepts ISO strings, most TDS users didnt notice. Some have (like Roy), and i have the problem fixed in 4.2.
I would recommend that client software accept supersets of CF when possible. Data writers should, OTOH, try to be strict with CF compliance, and I plead guilty as charged.
I think Bill's issue may be seperate from all that, and we are working on it. ill let you know what we find. 




On 4/30/2010 9:08 AM, Roy Mendelssohn wrote:



Huai-min and I had a face to face talk with Dan Swank and talked about
the issues with the OISST and the Blended Sea Winds aggregated data
showing ISO dates versus the indices that the "community" need for their
legacy code and scripts.



Not a question of legacy versus non-legacy, it is a question of standards.  One 
could argue what the CF or COARDS standard should use for its time units, and 
there is a forum for that.  But at the moment, ISO strings are not part of 
these standards.  Moreover, the service has as part of its metadata  that what 
I receive are COARDS compliant, which they are not.  It would be no different 
than if my service said it was OGC of ISO complaint and what was returned 
didn't follow the standard - our code would be broken.  We code to to the 
standard, which makes our code interoperable with all datasets that follow that 
standard.

Thanks,

-Roy


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"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or 
NOAA."
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Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
1352 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097

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