Dear Chris Thanks for your email. I think it would be fine for CF to use a region list maintained by another authority, provided:
* The list was available on the internet in an easy machine- and human-readable form and likely to be maintained. Since it would be used automatically by software, it should be available in a file which can be easily parsed to extract just the list e.g. plain text with nothing but the list in it. * The list contained geographical areas only. * The list contained explicit names, not codes or abbreviations, because CF seeks to be self-describing, as you know. We didn't adopt the GCMD list, if I remember correctly, because it didn't meet the first or second requirements. We took a subset of it and made our own list by making the entries look like other CF keywords i.e. all in lower case and joined by underscores. The last is obviously not essential, and was just for consistency. However, I would say that being case-insensitive is a good feature. It would be nuisance to have to get the case right! It's likely that another authority's list would not contain all that CF users might request, so either we'd need a way to add regions to it for CF purposes, or maintain a supplementary list for CF. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
