Hi Roy, Ag, et. al.,
Just want to go on record as **fully** supporting your concerns that we not
promote "a culture where individual groups are encouraged to develop their
own vocabularies". One of the goals in trying to separate CF development
(structure, syntax, semantics) from standard names (metadata - standardized
vocabularies) is to allow the development of the standard names table to
become more fully integrated into the vigorous community process that
already exists for defining standard vocabularies. Roy is one of the
leaders in that effort -- and his offer to map the BODC dictionary to the
Standard Names schema illustrates the positive prospects for separating
standard name development from CF per se.
Going the next step -- perhaps the XML schema for describing standard name
vocabularies should be conceived in a manner that promotes the consolidation
of separate vocabularies. XML "includes" can be used to build a new
vocabulary that is the fusion of two (or more) previously separate
vocabularies with audit trail tags used to indicate where some names have
been deprecated in order to reconcile differences.
- steve
==============================================
Roy Lowry wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> In principle I am attracted to Steve's idea and if the demand is there
> from the user community would be happy to map the BODC dictionary to the
> Standard Names schema and provide an export in compatible XML. This
> could also support Steve's suggestion of versioning definitions as once
> the major overhaul of the BODC dictionary is completed mechanisms will
> be turned on that archive previous versions of all updated records in
> the dictionary tables.
>
> I would, however, make one plea. If a culture where individual groups
> are encouraged to develop their own vocabularies is established, then I
> would strongly recommend some measure of control and a forum where these
> vocabulary developers can collaborate. As Ag points out, these
> vocabularies will inevitably overlap and the overlaps need to be covered
> by thesauri. I can tell you from fairly unpleasant experience that
> building the thesauri as the vocabularies develop (or agreeing to use
> each other's terms where appropriate) is much less painful than mapping
> independently-developed dictionaries each containing thousands of
> entries.
>
> Cheers, Roy.
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--
Steve Hankin, NOAA/PMEL -- Steven.C.Hankin at noaa.gov
7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115-0070
ph. (206) 526-6080, FAX (206) 526-6744
Received on Wed Jun 23 2004 - 11:07:25 BST
