The status quo (giving the CF attributes precedence over WKT) was discussed at great length when the possibility of including WKT strings was added. I have not reviewed that discussion but it would be relevant to do so to avoid repeating it! It's in https://cf-trac.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/69 and https://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/80. I opposed the introduction of WKT strings because I didn't like redundancy, which would probably lead to inconsistency, but I agreed with the resolution that we have, in which the CF attributes take precedence.
Without reviewing the previous discussion, these points occur to me: * The WKT model of metadata is different from the CF one. If I remember correctly, WKT overlaps with standard names and units of coordinate variables, not just with grid mapping attributes. Giving precedence to WKT would therefore mean that software would need to analyse the WKT in many circumstances. To enable this, we would need to draw up a thorough correspondence between the CF and WKT metadata models, with rules to resolve inconsistencies. That would be a big job * We would have to revise these rules whenever the definition of WKT was amended - maybe this doesn't happen often, but it's not under our control, and we can't foresee what problems it might cause for CF. * To give WKT precedence, we would have to require all CF-compliant applications to be able to parse WKT. That's a big expectation, which I think is unrealistic in practice. In view of these points, I don't think this proposal is the best way to proceed. Instead, if there are elements of the CRS that can't currently be represented in CF but are needed, we should consider adding them, as we have done before (your points 1 and 3). If the equivalence between CF and WKT is unclear or incomplete (related to my first point above) it should be improved (your points 2 and 4). -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/222#issuecomment-569325165 This list forwards relevant notifications from Github. It is distinct from [email protected], although if you do nothing, a subscription to the UCAR list will result in a subscription to this list. To unsubscribe from this list only, send a message to [email protected].
