Hi Maarten, I agree, prohibiting additional metadata would be a problem and is not something I am advocating. However, self-describing files seems to be a key principle of CF (which, I think, has prevented the adoption of opaque codes such as EPSG), so I was interested in how this stacked up, logically, with allowing non-CF metadata.
I take your point that the metadata describes the data. However, if you don’t know which metadata are sufficient to describe the data without reference to external resources then I would argue that is not self-describing. The example of an EPSG code is particularly interesting. As I’m sure you are aware, there are already long discussions about grid mapping parameters vs WKT. If I release a file with an EPSG attribute as well then users may be even more confused regarding which takes precedence and which should be ignored! Of course, you may rightly say that is bad practice on my part. However, with the convention as it stands, I can legitimately claim that file to be CF-compliant. Regards, Dan From: Maarten Sneep <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 25 June 2020 13:06 To: cf-convention/cf-conventions <[email protected]> Cc: Hollis, Dan <[email protected]>; Comment <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [cf-convention/cf-conventions] State the principles for design of the CF conventions (#273) Dan Hollis wrote: If opaque non-CF metadata are permitted then I’m not sure of the benefit of CF requiring the rest of the attributes to be self-describing (however good that might be in principle). This implies that either non-CF attributes should be prohibited or the principle of self-describing files should be dropped. Am I missing something? What do others think? I've always the self-describing principle to apply to the data, not to the metadata. In fact, the data becomes self describing because of the metadata. Prohibiting additional metadata will cause severe trouble in various fields of application, for instance when there is a requirements to support multiple metadata conventions (ACDD comes to mind) that are supplemental to CF. Maarten — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/273#issuecomment-649500189>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANWNP6S42NB6TGWAY7FWY23RYM4R7ANCNFSM4NZQXDKQ>. -- 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/273#issuecomment-649510864 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].
