For what it is worth, we migrated a lot of our systems metadata and config to JSON and it works like a charm. The primary reason was to enable humans and computers to co exist better. We tried XML but JSON won the day for us. Regards Pk
----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] <[email protected]> To: Jonathan Gregory <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Sent: Fri Sep 16 23:13:56 2011 Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] standard names for stations Hi Jonathan, My vote would go to something that is both human and machine-readable. There are standards designed for this such as JSON. Some might consider this comes down on the side of the machine more than the human, but I find once I get my in I can read JSON much easier than XML. If this is considered to be going over the top then we need to at least specify the order in which the component parts of the string are included and preferably we should specify a delimiter to separate the components. Even an ultra-light standard such as this makes the life of any programmer writing code to parse the string infinitely easier. Cheers, Roy. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Gregory Sent: 16 September 2011 15:32 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] standard names for stations Dear Nan, John, Jeff I think variable attributes are generally better than global attributes, because it's possible or indeed likely that you might have data from different sources in the same file. I prefer data variables to describe themselves. We can provide global attributes as a default for the whole file, but it seems safer to me to repeat the attributes per variable. Following John's point, I agree that this station ID information will not be usable by machine or guaranteed to be unique unless we standardise it in some way. I don't know about this subject, but I am sure there are people who are well-informed about it! If we want the station ID attribute(s) to be machine- readable, we can propose a standard format for them. If we want an attr where the data-writer can informally record ID information that another human could interpret, we don't need a standard format. Which do we want - any views? Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata -- This message (and any attachments) is for the recipient only. NERC is subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the contents of this email and any reply you make may be disclosed by NERC unless it is exempt from release under the Act. Any material supplied to NERC may be stored in an electronic records management system. _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
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