[CF-metadata] date and time

From: John Graybeal <graybeal>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:50:53 -0700

On Oct 27, 2008, at 10:00 AM, Steve Hankin wrote:
> The marine community is hoping to use the OGC standards process to
> develop XML schemas that capture the full semantic richness of all
> measurements that the community may want to interchange.

Maybe I missed that memo, but I don't think OGC or marine community
has said they are hoping to achieve this. ("Full semantic richness" is
well past any of our retirement ages, I'm pretty sure.)

The part of the goal that I know about, and subscribe to, is much more
modest: to be able to refer to a specific concept unambiguously, and
be able to define relationships -- recognizable to both humans and
computers -- between that concept and other concepts.

I think that goal will be achieved in a first incarnation in 20 days,
not 20 years. Will it be robust, flawless, impeccable semantic
representation of the world and our understanding of it? No, nor will
it ever be. Will it be a huge step forward from the days of 'sal' and
'T'? Very much so. (Though we have to say, a lot of the semantic
vision and capabilities reflect things that vocabulary communities
like CF have been working on for a long time. All OGC and the semantic
web people want to do is formalize the referencing of the terms and
their relationships.)

Apologies if this approximation is too ... approximate.

John
Received on Mon Oct 27 2008 - 11:50:53 GMT