Dear Martin, Roy et al. > I understand exactly what you want - or at least I thing I do. I think that > you would like to enter a URL representing the concept 'carbon monoxide' and > get back a document giving you all the Standard Names pertaining to carbon > monoxide. Am I right?
I appreciate that this need is not the same one as a system for proposing new standard names, on which I agree with the way Philip described it. But couldn't both needs be served by a generating grammar? If we have a complete grammar of standard_names, then we can record in the standard_name table how each one is generated from phrases, as well as the final result. Although you cannot always parse a standard_name unambiguously, you could look up what the correct decomposition was, or search the table for the occurrence of a particular species or other phrase in the decompositions. Later we could take a step further by recognising that some names are irregular and giving their decomposition in regular terms. Thus, for instance, specific_humidity could be recognised as composed of the semantic elements which would normally yield mass_fraction_of_water_vapor_in_air (which does not occur in fact). This is somewhat like Martin's idea of aliases for irregular names. It is like recognising that "went" = go + -ed. Of course, there is plenty of linguistic theory about this kind of thing! My grammar does not currently have such transformational rules. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
