[CF-metadata] [Standard name request] property changes over time

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:50:16 -0000

Dear Paul

You have raised two issues.

* Preference for X_change to change_in_X.

* Suggestion that any X could have _change suffixed without being approved as
a new standard name.

I think the first doesn't have a clear answer. It's a bit arbitrary. I would
say that change_in is probably clearer, although a bit longer, because
concatenating too many nouns can get a bit difficult or ambiguous to understand
in English. But we do have some long noun phrases in the stdname table. I don't
think there's a compelling need to change (sorry) our convention, myself.

We have discussed quite a lot of similar cases to the second point already,
and have so far always decided that even though it is desirable to construct
stdnames consistently, we will always approve them individually and manually
rather than automatically. That is because sometimes there's more than one way
to describe a quantity, so consistency is not unique, or because some
automatically constructed names might actually be physical nonsense, or because
there may be a common unsystematic term we'd prefer to adopt. Therefore
discussion about this issue has been concerned with providing tools to make it
easier to construct proposed standard names consistently. You're only asking
for three names, I think, which is not a big deal really. The standard name
table has over 2000 entries already so 3 more isn't going to cause indigestion.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Wed Apr 13 2011 - 09:50:16 BST