Hello John,
Mapping CF Standard names to GCMD Parameter Valids to the public domain 'variable' level shouldn't be a problem as the GCMD vocabulary is clearly a discovery vocabulary. The issues Bryan is eluding to result from trying to map a usage vocabulary (one containing terms that fully describe a data value) because vital information for the mapping (e.g. whether a value is a mean or a standard deviation) are held in CF fields other than the Standard Name.
Are you aware of the MMI vocabulary mapping workshop that was held in Boulder last August? CF was one of the vocabs used, but the work really only scratched the surface looking at maybe half a dozen terms. There should still be an OWL version of CF on the MMI site (as well as GCMD), but this will a snapshot that is now well out of date. There is however an open source tool to convert the XML to OWL (voc2OWL) and a very neat mapping tool (VINE). The resulting map is an OWL file that can be used with web services also provided by MMI to build a thesaurus server. I would strongly recommend their approach.
The one issue with the GCMD parameter valids that was never properly sorted at Boulder is that the mapping was done to GCMD variable terms without their overlying term hierarchy, which took no account of the fact that EARTH SCIENCE > Biosphere > Animal Taxonomy > Fish and EARTH SCIENCE > Oceans > Marine Biology > Fish are different. I know Luis Bermudez of MMI was looking at this issue, but don't know how far he got.
Building an ontology mapping between CF and GCMD was on my agenda for later this year to provide the capability to NDG for entering a CF Standard Name into a discovery portal and finding DIFs marked up using GCMD parameter valids. But I'm more than happy for someone else to make a start and would of course be happy to help once the time slot I've allocated for later this year comes around.
Cheers, Roy.
>>> John Caron <caron at unidata.ucar.edu> 4/5/2006 8:51:15 pm >>>
Is the standard name table in XML at:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata/standard_name.xml
being kept resonably up-to-date?
I'm thinking about using it to map to, eg DIF vocabulary. Has anyone else done any mappings like that?
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Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 01:14:11 BST
