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[CF-metadata] vocabulary-specific standard names

From: John Graybeal <graybeal>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:54:46 -0700

All,

MMI will soon make a recommendation to some netCDF users, and perhaps to the community, about storing their parameter name associations within a CF netCDF file. And so we'd like advice.

In particular, we face a scenario where the user has a set of local parameter names, which may be mapped to, or even equivalent to, terms in multiple community vocabularies. Here are 3 use cases, simplest first:

1. A term is not found in the CF standard names list, and for whatever reason can not be in that list.
2. Local custom requires association with a different vocabulary than CF.
3. There are multiple applicable vocabularies, which together fully describe this parameter, but individually are not sufficient.

In each case each individual name may be associated with a single external vocabulary, but some names have different associated vocabularies than others. In the third case (and perhaps the second), a single name may be associated with multiple external vocabularies.

It should be assumed that the association can be made by reference to a URI; that is, it is not necessary to specify both a vocabulary AND a term within that vocabulary, the URI can encompass both. (As opposed to a solution which requires a namespace for each vocabulary, then the term is specified within that namespace -- this has a certain appeal but isn't as important as compatibility with URIs.

Is there any particular operational practice or recommendation as to best practice, to enable associating the local parameter with terms in multiple community vocabularies, not just CF vocabularies? If not, does anyone want to recommend one to me? (I am willing to recommend it to CF if it makes sense to me, but I'm not skilled enough to try to originate a really good approach all by myself.)

I have reviewed the trac tickets but do not believe that any of them directly address this concern. Thank you for any advice.

John
-- 
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John Graybeal   <mailto:graybeal at mbari.org>  -- 831-775-1956 
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org   
Shore Side Data System: http://www.mbari.org/ssds
Received on Mon Jun 23 2008 - 13:54:46 BST

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