Martin,

I'll answer on the mailing-list since I have no trac-account.

2) seems fine to me, since it's only an extension to netcdf4/CDM-2.

1) I've never had problems with the current set of rules, so some more concrete examples where the current rules don't work might help persuade me.

And even your proposal is not completely clear: Do you really want to have both 'standard_name' and 'axis', or would one be enough. Requiring both 'axis = "X"' and 'standard_name = "projection_x_axis"' does not look efficient.


Best regards,

Heiko

On 2012-07-06 16:07, Martin Schultz wrote:
#90: Collection of CF enhancements for interoperable applications
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  mgschultz       |       Owner:  [email protected]
      Type:  enhancement     |      Status:  new
  Priority:  medium          |   Milestone:
Component:  cf-conventions  |     Version:
  Keywords:                  |
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
  Dear all,

      in an offline discussion with Jonathan and a few others, it became
  apparent that there may be a few limitations in the current CF convention
  which make life difficult for building true interoperable services. One of
  the major obstacles at present is the optional character of attributes, in
  particular for coordinate axes. If an application cannot rely on finding
  some specific information about a coordinate, it becomes virtualyl
  impossible to interpret this information correctly without human
  intervention (or one has to start guessing which will almost certainly
  fail at some point). According to my understanding, making attributes
  mandatory could break the backward compatibility principle that CF has
  hitherto held very high. Therefore, it appears appropriate to begin a
  collection of issues about the current CF convention which impediment the
  implementation of interoperability, and which would not be backward-
  compatible. Depending on the outcome of this discussion (for which we
  should allow some time), one could decide to either start a new CF major
  version number, or adopt all incompatible changes in one new step release
  version. It should be avoided to introduce incompatible changes in several
  individual releases.

       Here I begin with three items. Responses should indicate whether they
  agree that these changes cause incompatibilities. If you want to add other
  issues, please prepend an item number. If discussions on individual issues
  get lengthy, we should open separate track tickets for them and feed the
  conclusion back into this ticket.

  1) make axis attribute and standard_name attribute mandatory for
  coordinate variables

  2) introduce a "group" level in order to be compatbile with the netcdf4
  and hdf data model: each group can have its own coordinate system, but all
  variables within a group must share the same coordinates

  3) standardize use of comments where these are necessary to uniquely
  identify what a standard_name means or what a variable contains. Examples
  are the lumping of NMVOC compounds, where the definition of the lumped
  group should be provided, or the newly proposed emission sectors


--
Dr. Heiko Klein                              Tel. + 47 22 96 32 58
Development Section / IT Department          Fax. + 47 22 69 63 55
Norwegian Meteorological Institute           http://www.met.no
P.O. Box 43 Blindern  0313 Oslo NORWAY


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