Jonathan, Even better. I would vote to support this proposal. -Rich On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 6:40 AM, Jonathan Gregory <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear all > > In standard names I think CF has generally followed Roy's no (2): > >> 1) Create an idealised model with everything normalised and harmonised to >> the nth degree, declare it as a standard and force everybody to conform. >> 2) Accept community practice but make sure that everything is unambiguously >> described. Interoperability then comes through the development of semantic >> resources describing the relationships between the descriptions. > > That is, we try to describe what people actually use, rather than force them > to use a particular thing. Doing the latter may not work and in the end means > the standard is not adopted. That is why we have standard names for quantities > which could be interconverted. On the other hand, in CF in general we also try > to discourage unnecessary proliferation of choices, by not introducing new > mechanisms if we already have ones that would serve a new purpose. > > I agree that a general mask would be a good way forward, but land/sea is such > a common case, which we already support, that I think we should continue to > support it. But we could also introduce a standard name for a general type > mask, as Steve suggests. A data variable containing a mask with this standard > name should have a string-valued scalar coordinate variable with standard name > of area_type to specify it further. This is consistent with the idea behind > introducing the area_type, which allows us to describe quantities that depend > on area type without providing specific standard names for them. > > Cheers > > Jonathan >
-- Dr. Richard P. Signell (508) 457-2229 USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd. Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598 _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
