Dear Martin I am sure that most things could be done differently and many of them could be done better, but we have to recognise that few people have much time to spend on defining the CF standard, because it's a community effort with very little devoted resource. We can certainly consider ways to reform it, but it is slow, as you said. The annual GO-ESSP meeting has often/usually had a "CF day", which is an opportunity for a meeting. In practice, I think there is actually far too much to discuss. Many of our discussions require a lot of thought, and I suspect they are hard to settle at a one-off meeting. I tend to favour teleconferences for specific points.
Also, as your elaboration suggests, one can imagine lots of ways in which things can become immensely complicated. For me, that is the main reason for the principle that we only introduce new conventions when we have a definite need for them, rather than trying to foresee and allow for all possible generalities. Being concrete limits the complexity of the convention. > Therefore, I would argue that the "synchronizing" of obs is a special thing > and should be treated separately from the statistical treatment of variables. > Hence, the default in the sea water temperature and salinity case would be > that each variable has its own "count" (via cell_methods?). One could then > define a way to create this link via some sort of cross-referencing. I think I agree with that, and isn't it the situation we have? The statistical treatment of variables is done by cell_methods; the metadata for obs is done by standard_name modifiers, which are separate for each variable, though we are also discussing on this email list a way to link them together if needed. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
