[CF-metadata] stricter CF conventions

From: Schmidli Juerg <schmidli>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 12:38:31 +0200

Dear All

I think the CF-conventions could be made significantly simpler,
clearer and more precise without loosing anything of their
generality. The backwards-compatibility to COARDS makes the
implementation of a general CF-compatible application
unnecessarily complicated, due to the different ways of
achieving the same goal (e.g. identification of the
coordinate axes). No large changes would be required.
Changing some of the recommendations into requirements
would suffice.

Consider, for example, the identification of the coordinate
axes and their type. Presently, there are three ways to
identify the coordinate axes:
1. units and positive attribute
2. axis attribute
3. standard_name

A simpler strategy, and easier to implement would be:
- to identify the coordinate variables using the axis attribute
- to determine the type of coordinate using the standard_name attribute

This would require the axis and standard_name attribute to
be mandatory.

As with the present standard it would be easy to write
netcdf files which are both CF-STRICT and COARDS compatible,
and to write applications which process CF-STRICT and
COARDS netcdf files. Thus CF-STRICT + COARDS = CF-PRESENT.

Best wishes

Juerg
Received on Wed Jul 30 2003 - 04:38:31 BST