[CF-metadata] standard name for sea water ph without

From: Upendra Dadi <Upendra.Dadi>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:47:39 -0500

Hi Jonathan & John,
   Thank you for the replies. I understand now. I see that there are
complex semantic issues involved here. But the semantic issues should
not become operational bottlenecks. I work at a data center where I do
come across datasets where ambiguities about what the data represents is
not uncommon. Often, it is almost impossible to resolve the ambiguities.
If I have dataset which has an accompanying document which says that the
dataset represents sea water pH without giving any scale, there should
still be a way to encode this information into the dataset. If I am
creating a data discovery system, I still want this dataset to appear if
someone searches for all datasets containing sea water pH without
mentioning the scale. Of course, I can put this information as part of
long name or comment which is unstructured information, but for "deep"
semantic searches this is not an ideal solution. The ambiguities should
be handled systematically by the standard itself. I hope CF will evolve
to more effectively deal with such operational aspects.

Upendra


On 12/9/2011 1:29 PM, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> Dear Upendra
>
>> Coming to the problem of coming up with a standard name for pH
>> accurately, I can see the issue here. Though I am still not sure why
>> not all five standard names were included. If there is an analogy
>> between sea water pH and sea water temperature, as mentioned in one
>> of the emails, why not have sea_water_pH just as we have
>> sea_water_temperature?
> I think the reason not all five were added is that only one of them was
> requested at the time. I believe that was the right decision, because it's
> generally only when we have a real use-case that the expertise is at hand
> i.e. the proposer to explain what is required.
>
> My understand was that, unlike for sea water temperature, sea water pH
> would not be meaningful without the scale specified. That is, it's not a
> matter of technique, but a matter of definition. A better analogy would be
> that sea_water_temperature and sea_water_salinity are distinct quantities
> that can't both be described by a generic standard name.
>
> I can imagine that if a model had pH, it might possibly need a generic sort,
> because it might not represent the chemistry properly. However, that hasn't
> been proposed.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Jonathan
Received on Fri Dec 09 2011 - 12:47:39 GMT