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

From: John Graybeal <jbgraybeal>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 16:34:18 -0800

On Dec 9, 2011, at 10:29, Jonathan Gregory wrote:

>> 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.

Ah, my previous comment was to the wrong point. Jonathan is correct in the CF sense of things -- we requested all 5, but it was determined we only really needed 1 of the 5 at that time. Consistent with the CF philosophy, we elected not to cause ourselves trouble by "looking ahead." (By the way, I like your idea of referencing the thread somehow. Would be a nice contextual bit for those new to the discussion.)

On Dec 9, 2011, at 11:47, Upendra Dadi wrote:

> 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. ... 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.


I like this point.

One of the clear strengths of the CF vocabulary is that it has strong, conscientious community review, not to mention professional management, and that all of that is devoted to creating crisp terminology. I like your point here, and I could envision a subclass of names that are not so strongly constrained. (Oddly, a good name for this concept eludes me!) It would be nice to be able to search data, using standard names, for a class of parameter -- e.g., 'anything measuring sea_water_ph'.

This is enough of a variation on the current approach that it would almost certain require a TRAC ticket proposal and some discussion (because many of the generic terms would require different units under different circumstances, which is very non-CFish). So, let's see if there's interest....

John
Received on Fri Dec 09 2011 - 17:34:18 GMT