Hi All,
The last time we discussed formalizing grammar and vocabulary, or an ontology,
it was clearly hard to get agreement. It would also be a lot of hard work and
could be a lot of work to amend and modify if it is done too narrowly.
I suggest we consider a weaker option, which I think would give us much of the
benefit at moderately cost, and could be a step on the road to a more rigorous
system.
I suspect it would be fairly easy to take Jonathan's inferred grammar and
vocabulary system and attach meanings to each phrase and piece of grammar by
cutting and pasting from the existing std_name descriptions.
We could then tweak our current practice on this mailing list so that when a
person proposes a std_name they should state (or perhaps there is a little bit
of code to check) that the proposed std_name conforms to the existing grammar
and vocabulary rules. I think most of us would then provide only cursory
scrutiny. Perhaps there could even be an automatic timer so that if nobody
objects within some time period (perhaps 1 month) then the name is
automatically accepted. Essentially the default decision for conforming
names would be 'acceptance'. I think this would also make the generation of
the text descriptions either automatic, or perhaps obsolete, in many cases
because they could be inferred from the grammar and vocabulary tables.
This would provide faster acceptance for proposers, and allow this mailing
group to focus on the harder issues, primarily ones which want to modify or
extend the grammar and/or vocabulary.
I think this is what have been doing in practice for a while, and I think
formalizing it a little would make it better for all.
Best wishes,
Philip
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Philip Cameron-Smith, [email protected], Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:cf-metadata-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Gregory
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 5:37 AM
> To: Seth McGinnis
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] standard_name modifiers
>
> Dear Seth
>
> I think we can devise systems which will develop *proposed* standard
> names
> that conform to existing patterns and lexicon. If they do, they are
> often
> uncontroversial and usually accepted. However we still need a manual
> approval
> process because there are sometimes choices about how a quantity might
> be
> described i.e. there's more than one possible conformant proposal, and
> there
> are special cases when there is a commonly used term we might want to
> employ.
> Apart from those reasons, there are also a quite often proposals which
> require
> new lexicon, new interpretations or new patterns.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Jonathan
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