[CF-metadata] hydrosphere

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 10:08:35 +0000

> I fear this is a hopeless quest, which is why I suggested defining "sea" to
> include lake and river in the context of CF standard names.

A solution which would work, but I think would be ugly, would be to define
aliases with "lake_water" and "river_water" for all names containing
"sea_water" so they could be used with equivalent meaning. Thus, you could
use "river_water" to describe properties of water in the Pacific Ocean, and
"sea_water" for the Thames, and that could be confusing as well, but it would
allow people to use "sea", "lake" and "river" when appropriate.

This would possibly be an abuse of aliases, which we introduced to allow us
to correct mistakes, in effect i.e. when we subsequently decided names were
wrong in some way, so that data which used superseded names was still valid.
The purpose of standard names is to be standard! To introduce synonyms
undermines that aim. Hence I'm not sure if it's a good idea, although it would
get round this problem. Any views?

Jonathan
Received on Tue Feb 05 2008 - 03:08:35 GMT