Martin,
Another approach used for many systems is to do these mappings in a separate document or system. Some do this local to their own system; others use an interoperable mapping approach that uses the OWL format. I find the OWL format approach pretty slick, given the right tools. (Because the OWL and RDF formats are becoming widely adopted as a way to exchange vocabulary and mapping information, it is worth using them to present the CF mapping information also.)
[Disclaimer: I lead the MMI project.] MMI has the CF standard names in an ontology (
http://marinemetadata.org/cf) and has mapped them to GCMD, as well as some other private vocabularies. The VINE tool (
http://marinemetadata.org/vine) makes this process easy, and saves the mappings to an ontology for use by other systems. Tools also exist to convert many vocabulary formats to the OWL or RDF formats that VINE uses.
Contact me or see the web site if you want more information on this approach. We are just finishing a new release of VINE (actually, author Luis Bermudez is now at SURA; they deserve all the credit for this update), and offer additional guidance and documentation on the vocabulary mapping process.
John
At 10:13 AM +0200 4/4/08, Schultz, Martin wrote:
>Dear all,
>
> I am in the process of developing some analysis tools for the HTAP model experiments in IDL and have reached a stage where I would like to bring the (netcdf) output files to CF standard. What clearly helps in this respect is the compliance synthesis document (although I won't have time to implement all of these checks and rules). Now I would like to make use of the standard_name XML file in order to find out the appropriate names and units for the variables I find. IDL appears to offer some good tools to parse XML files, so there would be no need of rewriting that into some other format. However, I don't see how I can efficiently map our HTAP variable names onto the standard_name table. I saw that several of the entries contain an <amip> tag which presumably denotes the variable name in the AMIP convention. Would it be possible to also add an <htap> tag into these tables? Would something like this survive future updates of the standard_name tables? More generally: how are the XML files maintained and i
s it possible to add extra attributes?
>
> On the web I also saw the HTML table "Mappings to other parameter tables - PCMDI standard variable names" : Again - shouldn't this be incorporated into the XML file via a <pcmdi> tag? If there is a limited set of standard variable names (basically coming from large international intercomparison projects -- and these would likely converge over time, hopefuly), then having these extra tags in the XML file would create a "1-stop-shop" for standard names and really allow applications to make use of them without having to go through extra efforts of copying and pasting relevant entries for specific projects.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Martin
>
>< Dr. Martin G. Schultz, ICG-2, Forschungszentrum J?lich >
>< D-52425 J?lich, Germany >
>< ph: +49 (0)2461 61 2831, fax: +49 (0)2461 61 8131 >
>< email: m.schultz at fz-juelich.de >
>< web: http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg-2/m_schultz >
>
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--
----------
John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal at mbari.org> -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Initiative: http://marinemetadata.org || Shore Side Data System: http://www.mbari.org/ssds
Received on Fri Apr 04 2008 - 08:14:47 BST
