[CF-metadata] Regions, Gazetteer, etc

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:36:21 +0000

Dear Chris

Thanks for your email. I think it would be fine for CF to use a region list
maintained by another authority, provided:

* The list was available on the internet in an easy machine- and human-readable
form and likely to be maintained. Since it would be used automatically by
software, it should be available in a file which can be easily parsed to
extract just the list e.g. plain text with nothing but the list in it.

* The list contained geographical areas only.

* The list contained explicit names, not codes or abbreviations, because CF
seeks to be self-describing, as you know.

We didn't adopt the GCMD list, if I remember correctly, because it didn't meet
the first or second requirements. We took a subset of it and made our own
list by making the entries look like other CF keywords i.e. all in lower case
and joined by underscores. The last is obviously not essential, and was just
for consistency. However, I would say that being case-insensitive is a good
feature. It would be nuisance to have to get the case right!

It's likely that another authority's list would not contain all that CF users
might request, so either we'd need a way to add regions to it for CF purposes,
or maintain a supplementary list for CF.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Tue Jan 24 2012 - 14:36:21 GMT