Hi Jonathan, and all:
This is a really helpful comment for me on "what standard names are for". I have had reservations since the beginning about standard names, because they are "just a string", which severely limits what kind of relationships can be expressed among them.
Now "standard name = succint description = quick answer to 'what is this'?" finally makes this difficult process seem worth it. (Maybe its that Ive been stuck in the hell realm trying to figure out what arbitrary BUFR files mean using only the standard tables - no arbitrary key/value metadata! how sad!).
What Ive been hoping for is a way to describe the relationships between data variables, in a way that allows users to make queries across a large collection of heterogeneous datasets. This is what (I think) all the work in ontologies is after. Now it seems clear that standard names may be a good starting point, but alone are not rich enough to express the kinds of relationships needed to achieve this.
Since the "common concept" proposal seems to be also striving for this, its clearly time to consider what else is needed in addition to standard names. I will add further thoughts under that thread at:
http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/24
Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> Dear all
>
> This exchange of views has helped me to appreciate what I think standard names
> are for (see also http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/24). Possible the word
> "name" is somewhat misleading. I don't think of standard names as names, but as
> succint descriptions - something between a name and a definition, as I said
> earlier. As such, they are useful for listing the contents of a file, and for
> discussing quantities to be collected and archived, for example. They are short
> enough for these purposes, even though someone of them are bit a longer than a
> line. While I agree that fully self-describing files are not practicable, I
> find that the standard names do make the file contents fairly intelligible.
>
> It's because I don't think they are really names that I sometimes disagree
> with using the terms that are commonly used within a discipline, when those
> terms are not self-explanatory. Hence my preference for "diurnal thermocline
> base" rather than "[surface] foundation". If we just wanted a name, we would
> indeed choose the most familiar one, but if standard names are useful in
> the way I think they are, the name should sometimes be more like a quick
> answer that an expert would give to the question, "What do you mean by that?"
>
> Cheers
>
> Jonathan
> _______________________________________________
> CF-metadata mailing list
> CF-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
> http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
Received on Sat Apr 12 2008 - 15:50:40 BST
