Hi Nan,

Just to clarify I maintain two gazetteer-type vocabularies. 
http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/C19 for fresh and saltwater bodies under 
SeaVoX governance (supersedes C16 so forget that if you see it) and 
http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/C38 for valid cruise landing points (mostly 
ports) under SeaDataNet governance. I also serve out the ISO3166-1 list for 
valid (political) country names. The GCMD resource looks quite useful, but is 
quite limited in its coverage of sea areas and doesn't seem to match IHO.  
There are also resources such as the GEBCO undersea feature names maintained by 
SCUFN and a well-supported resource from Flanders Marine Data centre (VLIZ) 
that has C19 plus much more.

I think the overall conclusion from this is that there unlikely to ever be one 
resource that satisfies every need of every community and as you say CF 
shouldn't end up trying to build one. This leads to the approach of allowing 
attribute population from any resource providing the resource used is 
referenced (particularly important for resources that deliver geometries!).

However, in the case of CMIP5 I doubt if any published resource will fulfil 
their requirements because the spatial objects are sections defined by the 
project, which are unlikely to be included in any resource originating outside 
the project.  Therefore they need their own project-specific resource and I 
can't see any alternative to this being governed and served by CF.

Cheers, Roy.

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nan Galbraith
Sent: 12 January 2012 15:15
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Request for a region standard_name

Hi All -

Maintaining a gazetteer seems a little outside the scope of CF -
wouldn't it be preferable to require (or at least allow) an attribute
for the "region" variable pointing to an external vocabulary?

char geo_region(lbl,strlen) ;
    geo_region:standard_name="region" ;
    geo_region:vocabulary_name="GCMD Location Keywords" ;

I thought SeaDataNet might have a good candidate for this, but a
quick search on the NERC vocab server makes me think that they've
separated out sea and land area names, and that would clearly cause
problems for some types of data.

So, as far as I know, GCMD has the only (well publicized) set of terms
that includes water bodies as well as land areas.

The GCMD list seems to have been updated this past October; it is available
at gcmd.nasa.gov/Resources/valids/archives/keyword_list.html

Cheers - Nan

On Jan/11/2012 8:36 PM, Karl Taylor wrote:
Dear Alison and all,

I have not objection to adding the region.  I also favor the Standard Names 
Committee (and you) be responsible for the region names.  Finally, I would ask 
the committee to consider adding any CMIP5 region identifiers to the official 
list, unless of course those names seem inappropriate.

thanks,
Karl

On 1/11/12 7:00 AM, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
wrote:

Dear Jonathan,



In September Jim Biard requested a standardized region name for the contiguous 
United States. Several people commented and there was general agreement that 
contiguous_united_states would be a suitable string to add to the list of 
region names.



Before I proceed, however, I note that the file on the CF website which 
contains the region names also contains the following introductory text:

"This list was based on the NASA GCMD keyword list for locations which was 
valid on 12 December 2002. We retained only the names of geographical regions 
from the GCMD list, changing them to lower case and replacing the separators 
within the names by underscores to be consistent with the style used for CF 
standard names. We excluded (a) countries (these could be added if required), 
(b) regions that could be specified by coordinate ranges in CF (e.g. western 
hemisphere), (c) ill-defined regions (e.g. west Africa), (d) names for layers 
and surfaces of the Earth (e.g. mantle, sea floor), which are or would be 
included in standard names if required. We have also added names shown like 
this. Our intention is to keep this list consistent with GCMD."



I wonder if this list has ever been updated since December 2002 (I certainly 
haven't made any changes). Does the list need to be reviewed? Also, strictly 
speaking, the region list is separate from the standard name table, so do we 
want it to be maintained along with standard names (I'm happy to keep it up to 
date if the answer is 'yes') or should it be regarded as the domain of the 
conventions committee? I'd appreciate it if we can clarify who should be 
maintaining the list before I go ahead and start making modifications. I think 
there may be some CMIP5 related region names that are also not currently part 
of the list.



Best wishes,

Alison



------

Alison Pamment                          Tel: +44 1235 778065

NCAS/British Atmospheric Data Centre    Email: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

R25, 2.22

Harwell Oxford, Didcot, OX11 0QX, U.K.







-----Original Message-----

From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
[mailto:cf-metadata-

[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Jonathan Gregory

Sent: 16 September 2011 16:55

To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Request for a region standard_name



Dear Jim



Following Don's comment, if you'd be happy with a standard region name

of

contiguous_united_states, and since no-one else has objected, I think

we

should agree to that. (We can omit of_america; I would expect people to

know

where the united_kingdom is without

of_great_britain_and_northern_ireland!)

I expect Alison will comment and/or add it to the table when she is

able to.



Cheers



Jonathan

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