@JonathanGregory It does, but in that case, I think the current wording is too strong. I don't think zero external references is achievable. Much as we try to make them intuitively obvious and self-explanatory, it's not uncommon to have to look up the precise definitions of controlled vocabulary terms on the website, and I call that an external reference. (In my book, anything not in the netcdf header itself is external.)
Plus, we now have some issues in development (such as provenance tracking and I think cell_measures for CMIP6 ocean data, IIRC?) where there are strong practical reasons for wanting to reference information that is stored separately, and I think CF is going to have to bend to accommodate them. (There's a potential dodge in the form of saying "dataset" rather than "file", where it could be argued that those are part of the same dataset, but that opens up a hole, because then where do you stop?) So I think it needs to be loosened a little. This is a guiding principle, not a definition, so what about something along the lines of: "CF-netCDF metadata is designed to make each dataset as self-describing as possible, meaning that the need to reference external resources to interpret the dataset should be minimal."? And then perhaps we might want some discussion about the cases where this principle has been bent a little for reasons of feasibility and practicality. -- 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-649730008 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].
