Jonathan,
Even better. I would vote to support this proposal.
-Rich
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 6:40 AM, Jonathan Gregory
<j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
>
--
Dr. Richard P. Signell?? (508) 457-2229
USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598
Received on Tue Jan 04 2011 - 06:01:39 GMT
