Hi Jonathan,
My vote would go to something that is both human and machine-readable. There are standards designed for this such as JSON. Some might consider this comes down on the side of the machine more than the human, but I find once I get my in I can read JSON much easier than XML.
If this is considered to be going over the top then we need to at least specify the order in which the component parts of the string are included and preferably we should specify a delimiter to separate the components. Even an ultra-light standard such as this makes the life of any programmer writing code to parse the string infinitely easier.
Cheers, Roy.
-----Original Message-----
From: cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu [mailto:cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of Jonathan Gregory
Sent: 16 September 2011 15:32
To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] standard names for stations
Dear Nan, John, Jeff
I think variable attributes are generally better than global attributes,
because it's possible or indeed likely that you might have data from different
sources in the same file. I prefer data variables to describe themselves. We
can provide global attributes as a default for the whole file, but it seems
safer to me to repeat the attributes per variable.
Following John's point, I agree that this station ID information will not be
usable by machine or guaranteed to be unique unless we standardise it in some
way. I don't know about this subject, but I am sure there are people who are
well-informed about it! If we want the station ID attribute(s) to be machine-
readable, we can propose a standard format for them. If we want an attr where
the data-writer can informally record ID information that another human could
interpret, we don't need a standard format. Which do we want - any views?
Best wishes
Jonathan
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Received on Fri Sep 16 2011 - 09:13:56 BST
