[CF-metadata] standard name grammar

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 11:33:47 +0100

Dear Philip, Steve and Robert

Thanks for your comments. I think all comments are welcome, both detailed
and general. The grammar has intellectual interest, but my main aim is to see
whether we can produce something that'll help standard names to be agreed more
quickly and with less effort, as Philip suggests.

* "In the phenomenon section, you list both 'due_to' and 'from'. However, from
examining the patterns, the only time 'from_phenomenon' appears is as a
secondary phenomenon." That's right, and actually the primary phenomenon is
always the same one! So I should really have just put the from phrases as part
of the due_to and omitted the from category. Thanks.

* "Is it worth adding usage comments to the lexicon?" Yes, absolutely. In
fact, we could put explanatory text in the lexicon that could automatically
be used to synthesise the full description of the standard name, by stringing
together the text for the constituent phrases. The lexicon would have to be
an xml file to make this manageable, I suppose, which is a pity because xml
files are much less readable than plain files in columns!

* "could/should the "water_source" vocabulary be subsumed under "phenomenon"?"
That's a good idea. The from_(water_source) phrases really have the same kind
of function as due_to_(phenomenon) and those types could be merged.

* "wondering whether the "untyped" names might deserve to be treated
a little differently ..." Quite right. I made some related comments in the
"Directions" section about what could be done in future. Since there is only
one level of parsing at present, the grammar cannot recognise that
  product_of X and Y
is a higher-level pattern, in which "product_of" and "and" are essential
syntactic elements. Several of the untyped phrases are used for such purposes.
Others are used to generate scalar standard names from species etc. These would
be recognised at a lower level of parsing.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Tue May 04 2010 - 04:33:47 BST