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#95: Development of CF 1.5 Data Model
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  Reporter:  markh           |       Owner:  [email protected]
      Type:  task            |      Status:  new                          
  Priority:  medium          |   Milestone:                               
 Component:  cf-conventions  |     Version:                               
Resolution:                  |    Keywords:                               
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Comment (by graybeal):

 {{{When an attribute appears both globally and as a variable attribute,
 the variable's version has precedence}}}

 >>It's a worrying consequence of the all-attributes-are-really-data-
 attributes approach that it renders the global attribute meaningless.
 >I think that's stretching the point a bit far. It's certainly true that
 one needs to think a bit harder about what it means to "take precedence".
 This example clearly indicates that it should not mean destroy.

 Though ambiguous, I've always thought it meant the global attribute is
 lost. Which I thought was bad design, because I'm convinced global
 attributes should be managed as Jon Blower describes. If global and
 variable attributes exist and differ, maybe "whoever wrote the data messed
 up", or maybe they followed the description to provide a default value and
 override values.

 I see "how do we handle global attributes during processing?" as a red
 herring. If collections get remerged into new combinations, then global
 attributes can be handled via provenance, describing where the newly
 merged variable attributes came from (and if desired, the attributes of
 those sources). Whereas, if the task is to merge a group of uniform
 collections into a single collection, the global attributes should already
 be identical or vary in known and manageable ways; if not, one is back to
 the provenance solution.

 So if the CF data model is only describing past practices, you can forget
 about that -- the original was too ambiguous to present a single correct
 answer.  (In which case provide the new answer, and people can satisfy the
 ambiguity however they feel is right.)

 If the data model provides the best way forward, it should definitely
 support Jon's list.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/95#comment:87>
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