[CF-metadata] a different (but perhaps unoriginal) approach to standard name construction

From: Pascoe, S <stephen.pascoe>
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 12:00:34 -0000

 
Here's an idea that people will either love or hate. What about
defining a convention for embedding RDF triples in NetCDF, in a similar
fashion to what RDFa does in XHTML. This way we could leverage the full
richness of RDF to describe our relationships. The same mechanism would
work in NetCDF, NCML and OpeNDAP because of their shared data model.

The downside is that processing RDF is cumbersome without specialist
libraries and tools.

Cheers,
Stephen.

---
Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
British Atmospheric Data Centre
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
-----Original Message-----
From: cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu
[mailto:cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of John Caron
Sent: 03 November 2008 15:33
Cc: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] a different (but perhaps unoriginal) approach
to standard name construction
I would propose that we dont replace the current standard_name
attribute, but explore alternative representations of their  semantics.
The goal would be to clarify the relationships of the various semantic
components of a standard quantity, and to explore possible grammers for
generating the name. 
While the end product of CF Conventions is to create specific metadata
to be placed in data files, I think we often limit our thinking to the
rather small set of representational forms that can be encoded into the
netCDF-3 (aka classic) data model. 
To be specific, standard names are limited to being represented as char
attributes, and so our dialogue about them sometimes seems limited to
sequential "flat space" concepts. Of course actually we have an
extremely rich associative semantic linkage in our minds. 
The idea, for me, would be to look for some richer representations of
the associations and relationships between standard quantities, which
could accelerate the process of constructing them. We can then decide if
we want to encode these in a netcdf file using a single standard_name
attribute and/or multiple "standard_name_component" attributes,
auxiliary coordinates, common concepts, or even (god forbid) rdf
triples.
So I think we should start trying out different representations, and not
make any big decisions, until/unless we have something that we like.
Ok, I lied about the rfd triples inside of netcdf, that's not ok. ;^)
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Received on Tue Nov 04 2008 - 05:00:34 GMT