[CF-metadata] Another potentially useful extension to the standard_name table

From: Lowry, Roy K. <rkl>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 19:30:29 +0100

Hello Jonathan,

I'm finding myself in total agreement with you and hope to start demonstrate over the coming weeks how vocabulary server technology can cover both Martin's use case and the use case for whic you did your work.

Cheers, Roy.

________________________________________
From: Jonathan Gregory [j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk]
Sent: 24 September 2012 17:53
To: Schultz, Martin
Cc: Lowry, Roy K.; cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Another potentially useful extension to the standard_name table

Dear Martin, Roy et al.

> I understand exactly what you want - or at least I thing I do. I think that you would like to enter a URL representing the concept 'carbon monoxide' and get back a document giving you all the Standard Names pertaining to carbon monoxide. Am I right?

I appreciate that this need is not the same one as a system for proposing
new standard names, on which I agree with the way Philip described it. But
couldn't both needs be served by a generating grammar? If we have a complete
grammar of standard_names, then we can record in the standard_name table how
each one is generated from phrases, as well as the final result. Although you
cannot always parse a standard_name unambiguously, you could look up what the
correct decomposition was, or search the table for the occurrence of a
particular species or other phrase in the decompositions.

Later we could take a step further by recognising that some names are
irregular and giving their decomposition in regular terms. Thus, for instance,
specific_humidity could be recognised as composed of the semantic elements
which would normally yield mass_fraction_of_water_vapor_in_air (which does not
occur in fact). This is somewhat like Martin's idea of aliases for irregular
names. It is like recognising that "went" = go + -ed. Of course, there is
plenty of linguistic theory about this kind of thing! My grammar does not
currently have such transformational rules.

Best wishes

Jonathan--
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Received on Mon Sep 24 2012 - 12:30:29 BST