Dear Daniel
I assume you mean a data variable which has strings describing quality or
status states, probably encoded with flag_values and flag_meanings. Would
the flag_meanings be meaningful to a human reading them? If so, you could
regard the file as self-describing. Self-describing doesn't have to mean
self-documenting, I would say. Standard names are self-explanatory to some
extent, and make the file self-describing, but they also have definitions
which aren't in the file, and papers in the peer-reviewed literature about
the quantities. If the flag_meanings are self-explanatory, I think that's OK,
but I'm not in favour of putting codes in the CF-netCDF file.
Best wishes
Jonathan
----- Forwarded message from Daniel Neumann <daniel.neumann at dkrz.de> -----
> Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:45:33 +0200
> From: Daniel Neumann <daniel.neumann at dkrz.de>
> To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
> Subject: [CF-metadata] PID to external description of Quality and Status
> states
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101
> Thunderbird/60.8.0
>
> Dear list,
>
> A CF-conformal NetCDF file should be as self-describing as possible.
> URIs/PIDs poitining to external data sources are problematic in this
> context. However, IDs pointing to external data sources were already
> discussed for taxa in the CF Trac Ticket #99 "Taxon Names and
> Identifiers" (https://cf-trac.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/99).
>
> Let's assume we have a long description of quality control measures
> performed resulting in N possible quality states for a NetCDF
> variable. The full description could be part of a peer-reviewed
> paper or grey literature (with assigned PID). However, it is too
> long to be included in the attribute "description" of the
> quality/status flag variable. One solution would be to add a brief
> description of the quality states to the quality_flag/status_flag
> variable and point to the external full description via it's PID.
>
> What is your opinion on this?
>
> This is not a request for a feature but rather meant to collect some
> opinions on this topic. It is somehow related to the request of a
> global PID attribute in CF GitHub Issue 160 "Add attribute
> citation_id"
> (https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/160).
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>
>
> --
> Dr. Daniel Neumann
> Abteilung Datenmanagement
>
> Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH (DKRZ)
> Bundesstra?e 45 a ? D-20146 Hamburg ? Germany
>
> Phone: +49 40 460094-120
> Email: daniel.neumann at dkrz.de
> URL: www.dkrz.de
>
> Gesch?ftsf?hrer: Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig
> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg
> Amtsgericht Hamburg HRB 39784
>
>
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----- End forwarded message -----
Received on Wed Jul 24 2019 - 09:58:40 BST
