[CF-metadata] CF provisional standards

From: Bryan Lawrence <b.n.lawrence>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:59:08 +0000

Hi Jonathan

I strongly disagree with what you have written here:

> I think we should add new stuff to the standard, just as
> we always have.

I think we should make a clean break between standard name additions and
any other sort of modifications. This is why we decided on two
committees. We now have versioned standard names lists, updating
approximately monthly.

Any other modifications should be provisional and go through the
procedure outlined in the white paper, which has been agreed! That's not
to say we can't have a provisional copy of the convention/standard,
which represents best practise until the next "official" version.

Folk can write data files which conform to that "provisional" standard,
and presumably if they're writing it they'll have tools which can
manipulate it, but in no way should anyone consider that anyone else can
read/manipulate/understand it until there are implementationS.

> "provisional" status. If the CF process takes a year to decide something,
> it is no use to turn round and say to someone, "Sorry, that was provisional,
> your data is now deemed to be all wrong."

In that situation all we are saying is that - nope, yours is the only
code that can understand that data! If you want others to read it,
without writing new code, you may need to rewrite it! That's fair! It
doesn't make their data any less valid.

> Also, I would say that experience shows we haven't made large blunders, in
> the sense of agreeing something that was actually unworkable.

Actually, given I'm not aware of *one* codebase that supports *all* of
CF, all experience tells us is that CF is "too complex" or "not worth
implementing yet in its entirety". The lack of a complete implementation
argues against your point!

In most standards initiatives, one requires at least two implementations
that can interoperate ... and I think CF should require that too. (I
think I'm actually arguing for finding a CF version 0.9 which is
somewhere between COARDS and CF 1.0, but which at least some folk have
completely implemented).

In a completely different discussion, we found it useful to have a table
for specifications which had four columns like this:

specification name / commonly implemented version/ current official
version/ provisional version/

and we need that for CF! That's the reality of interoperability!

(Again, nothing in the above is arguing against rapid turn around of
standard names).

Cheers
Bryan
Received on Fri Nov 17 2006 - 05:59:08 GMT