[CF-metadata] Request for standard_name="sea_binary_mask"

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 11:40:48 +0000

Dear all

In standard names I think CF has generally followed Roy's no (2):

> 1) Create an idealised model with everything normalised and harmonised to the nth degree, declare it as a standard and force everybody to conform.
> 2) Accept community practice but make sure that everything is unambiguously described. Interoperability then comes through the development of semantic resources describing the relationships between the descriptions.

That is, we try to describe what people actually use, rather than force them
to use a particular thing. Doing the latter may not work and in the end means
the standard is not adopted. That is why we have standard names for quantities
which could be interconverted. On the other hand, in CF in general we also try
to discourage unnecessary proliferation of choices, by not introducing new
mechanisms if we already have ones that would serve a new purpose.

I agree that a general mask would be a good way forward, but land/sea is such
a common case, which we already support, that I think we should continue to
support it. But we could also introduce a standard name for a general type
mask, as Steve suggests. A data variable containing a mask with this standard
name should have a string-valued scalar coordinate variable with standard name
of area_type to specify it further. This is consistent with the idea behind
introducing the area_type, which allows us to describe quantities that depend
on area type without providing specific standard names for them.

Cheers

Jonathan
Received on Tue Jan 04 2011 - 04:40:48 GMT