Hi,
I strongly support the posting of Nan Galbraith below. This makes sense to me
and it is the way we are using ISO strings today, in global attributes meant
for discovery purposes. I do not currently see the point of changing the way
the time variable is being handled.
That aside I would also strongly support a time which defaults to UTC and not
local time unless time zone is specifically stated. Defaulting to local time
zone would highly complicate use of data for users not familiar with them,
defaulting to true solar time would be easier, but may not be as useful to
most users.
All the best
?ystein
> 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 *
> *******************************************************
--
Dr. Oystein Godoy
Norwegian Meteorological Institute
P.O.BOX 43, Blindern, N-0313 OSLO, Norway
Ph: (+47) 2296 3000 (switchb) 2296 3334 (direct line)
Fax:(+47) 2296 3050 Institute home page: http://met.no/
Received on Wed Oct 27 2010 - 01:39:50 BST
