There have been a lot of emails lately, from varying sources, expressing frustration with the CF standard names process (and/or Jonathan), and implicitly wondering whether the cost is worth the value.
As someone who at times criticizes CF, I'd like to add my voice on its behalf. Jonathan should not always have to be the defender of the faith, or the process. Although he does so quite well, as in this case.
There have always been a large number of diverse communities using vocabularies (whether they actually had a managed list of terms and definitions, or not). Even within institutions or communities, finding common vocabularies can be difficult or impossible. Agreement on a single vocabulary is not always possible, and in these cases, the community always has the option of mapping its vocabulary terms to those in CF.
Why use CF standard names at all? Because they serve as a common language for translating, or more accurately sharing, many useful concepts. Why does the CF vocabulary community have such 'endless' debates about terms? Because this is necessary to let CF continue to be the best possible common language for its users, who come from many communities. It is never easy to come to agreements that are robust and widely endorsed.
For those who think CF is not meeting their needs for exchanging data, there are certainly other vocabularies out there, and options for mapping them to CF terms. For those who think it isn't a very good vocabulary, I encourage you to compare it to other wide-ranging vocabularies for scientific parameters -- having done so in a few narrow domains, I claim it is noticeably better than almost anything else out there. For those who are frustrated with the process, please take some time to consider the alternatives, and propose improvements if you think they are warranted.
But most of all, please appreciate the value and interoperability obtained by the high number of users of CF standard names, and compare it to the relatively low costs incurred by the managers (financial), the contributors (time), and the people adding terms (time and frustration). The fact that a lot of users are taking on the work of getting their terms into CF will hopefully be seen as a sign of its success, and of the importance of adding resources for its continued development.
John
At 11:04 AM +0100 4/12/08, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
>Dear Craig
>
>Yes, I've already said that I agree that your list
>
>> surface_temperature (already defined)
>> sea_water_temperature (for temperatures at depth)
>> sea_surface_skin_temperature
>> sea_surface_subskin_temperature
>> sea_surface_foundation_temperature
>
>is in the end the best solution we can agree on, although it comes full circle,
>as you said.
>
>I am sorry that I subsequently confused this or it got lost by reusing this
>example in the wider debate on what standard names are for, because it's a
>good example. The discussion is important but does not solve any immediate
>problem, so we should go with what you have proposed.
>
>I am going to make further comments now, but that doesn't mean I am arguing
>against the above!
>
>You are quite right that to serve the community better CF should make its
>decisions faster. This is a long-standing problem, which partly comes from the
>fact that despite its growing importance, and the fact that it is used by many
>projects (like yours) to which large resources are committed, CF itself still
>has very little dedicated staff effort. It is a common resource which benefits
>many institutions but is paid for by hardly anyone. (That's an even wider issue
>than standard names in general, so doesn't really belong in this thread!)
>
>I tried to explain in an earlier posting why I think standard names are partly
>definitions, and why that means they are not just "names". It is because the
>community the data serves is often broader than the one which produces the
>data. What is understood in a smaller community is often not so clear to a
>larger community. That doesn't imply any disrespect to the authority or the
>expertise of the smaller community. I understand that people may feel indignant
>if they think someone else is claiming to describe their data better than they
>can themselves, but that is not the intention. When I have questioned standard
>name proposals, the question is often, "What does that mean?", and then I have
>often made suggestions that the standard name adopted should have elements of
>the *answer* to the question, so that other users will not have to ask. They
>can just look at the metadata and know what the data is. As a data analyst, I
>think this is very important. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time
>hunting down definitions and documentation to decide which of the quantities in
>a dataset is the one I want to use. I hope that seems reasonable to you.
>
>Thank you for persisting with CF.
>
>Best wishes
>
>Jonathan
--
----------
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 Sat Apr 12 2008 - 10:36:29 BST
