[CF-metadata] thredds changing CF conventions version

From: John Caron <caron>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 17:25:21 -0600

Hi Seth:

On 8/28/2013 12:59 PM, Seth McGinnis wrote:
> Hi Sean,
>
> Personally, I would regard that as suspect behavior.
>
> I'm of the opinion that it's best practice for a data service to
> affect the data it operates on in very targeted and transparent
> way, and that it should pass everything else through untouched.
> If it doesn't do that, it's harder to trust the service, because
> the more ways that it modifies the data, the more opportunities
> there are for it to get something wrong, and the more likely it
> is that the error will go unnoticed because it's hiding amongst a
> bunch of other changes.

We take this philosophy also.

>
> Case in point, I have recently discovered that when the THREDDS
> server subsets CF data that uses a coordinate system other that
> lat-lon, it mangles a bunch of the ancillary data in the file. I
> suspect this happens, ironically enough, precisely because it's
> trying to make the data CF-1.0 conformant instead of just leaving
> it as-is...

Let us know what the specifics are and we can try to make it better.

>
> So yes, I think it's significant that the data coming out of
> THREDDS is in a different convention than the source files, and
> that it's cause for concern.

A famous story from NCAR data portal early days is that some users added
the Conventions = "CF-1.0" attribute to their data because they had to
make their data CF compliant. But thats all they did. Hey, it passed the
compliance checker! ;)

Regards,
John
Received on Wed Aug 28 2013 - 17:25:21 BST