November Documentation 2014 Telecon

ACDD 1.3

open topics

1. publisher
2. version for software/algorithm
3. Review of GCRS (geospatial)
4. then maybe move to new items

Meeting

(Anna) – what about standard names that are not in CF?

You can't include the source in the CF standard_name attribute. And you can't use non-CF standard names and still be CF compliant.

Review of grammatical and minor changes

some new wording proposed for sections Attribute Crosswalks (tweaked to correct meaning), Maintenance of Metadata, Comma-Separated Lists, ID. Issues?

Re CSV, will this cause issue in netCDF if each entity has double quotes around it (e.g., with ncdump, ncml)? It should put whole thing in quotes and then escape interior quotes.

Geospatial* – changes with new functionality but with minimal disruption to existing usage. Accepted without issue.

Minor changaes for keywords vocabulary example. No issue.

Versions for software/algorithm?

Phil not here, John bringing up but not proposing we try to include these.

As a side note, moving forward, can we use the wiki for registry of suggested changes that did not make this edition because of not enough community support/need?–

Described the actual proposals for algorithm_version/software_version and product_version

(Bob) – how different is source and history from these?

Ted – history is a text blob and isn’t useful for lineage (ex. Change dataset and multiple sources) – the attribute model is weak.

John G – Idea is to provide something good enough for coding – can add version to the history, but it doesn’t guarantee things in history in a consistent way

Ted – history is for things changed after creation of the data set, source is the creation, right?

Bob – No, history used as how to create this data set.

? – This is a change from the original definition of History from netCDF user guide (NUG). Sort of a nasty thing to change. You could read the NUG either way. CF standard has wording "audit trail for modifications of original data", NUG has something similar.

John G - as written here, was meant as "how did this last version come into existence." Maybe we are overparsing 'create.'

Bob – either way ‘has been’ not only done after created

Ted - NUG is the authority of the attribute

John G. – want to clarify the definition as there is some ambiguity.

Ted - probably OK as is, it doesn't seem to be in conflict, or maybe it does.

Ted – if have multiple process steps or source then the model will break

Bob – shouldn't debate that here, that change should be in a future version

The original definition in ACDD 1.0 was consistent with NUG – "Provides an audit trail for modifications to the original data."

John G – revert first sentence back to original text (APPROVED)

John G - Does anyone want to propose discussing including those two version terms?

Discussion would be longer than we have time for today.

Revisiting standard_name_vocabulary

What if we don’t want to use CF standard names vocabulary

Need to use CF standard names to be compliant

Bob – this is the first thing that will break with CF

Anna - We could support other kinds of names than CF standard names, just wouldn't be compliant.

Ted – ACDD is separate and modular convention

Bob - Section at top addresses relationship of ACDD to CF conventions, says we adopt all global conventions.

What if you have multiple standard name vocabularies, can we do that? Could be, but there's no way to specify in standard_name attributes what vocab they are.

This topic is not going to be resolved today.

Meeting in 2 Weeks (Dec 4) and will have an ongoing discussion via emails.

Winter Meeting Sessions

Tuesday 2:00 – 3:30

Metadata for Discoverability, Accessibility, Useability, and Understanding (BEDI/NASA)

Wiki Category: Documentation Connections and related work – John Kozimor

Tuesday 4:00 – 5:30

Metadata evaluation: consistency, compliance and improvement

JPL Compliance Checker – Ed Armstrong

Collection Analytics and Improvement Strategies – Ted Habermann

Metadata Metrics: NOAA Lessons Learned – Anna Milan

GCMD, DIF, ECHO Metadata Quality Tool – Tyler Stevens

Thursday 1:30 – 3:00

Attribute Convention for Data Discovery: Present and Future

New Version of ACDD (or in Discovery Session) – John Graybeal

ISO Encoding in HDF – Ted Habermann

Documentation Cluster Business Meeting – All

Changing technology/adopting convention/standards is postponed for summer meeting – maybe even a good theme or subtheme

Next Meeting

December meeting is during AGU… Dec 18 – will see what kind of interest there is.