Hi all -
We seem to be flogging this more than necessary,
so sorry if I'm just adding to that.
On 10/25/10 3:43 PM, Ben Hetland wrote:
> I do believe, though, that ISO date/time strings do have a utility
> in--or as part of-- textual metadata fields associated with such
> coordinates, for instance as in the unit property of the time dimension
> ("minutes since 2001-01-01T00Z").
I don't agree that we want to change the convention
for the time units ("minutes since 2001-01-01T00Z"), at
least not until - or if - UDUNITS decides to implement
ISO date strings. UDUNITS is too intrinsic to CF, and
changing the convention for time has serious consequences
for existing data sets. Time's units are not really
'textual metadata fields' - they're intrinsic to
(machine) understanding of the time coordinate.
I DO think ISO strings are useful in other metadata
fields, where CF doesn't provide a standard. This means
that provenance date strings and data set time limits in
my global attributes are in a different format from my
time variable's unit's reference date string, but that's
a small price to pay, IMHO, because these are used very
differently.
Cheers - Nan
--
*******************************************************
* Nan Galbraith (508) 289-2444 *
* Upper Ocean Processes Group Mail Stop 29 *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution *
* Woods Hole, MA 02543 *
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Received on Tue Oct 26 2010 - 08:41:03 BST
