[Esip-documentation] New ACDD home page

Mon May 20 21:54:56 EDT 2013

Hi everyone, 

I talked with David N and Derrick S end of last week, and we agreed on some basic strategies, and today I finally updated all the definitions [1].

Please consider these new definitions -- and deletions [3], additions, and rearrangements into different categories -- food for discussion.  You might want to first decide whether to broadly accept the approach in each case, then nit-pick the definitions.

The approaches are documented in some detail in the discussion page of the Working document [2]. But extremely briefly:
- Neither totally computable, nor totally incomputable (but just right :->); encouraged use of structured text in many fields
- Somewhat flat, but somewhat structured: structured text in fields (optionally), but fewer fields with ancillary metadata
- Support a range of keyword styles, but avoid recommending any in particular; support multiple keyword and standard_name vocabularies
- Generally did not include guidance, as much for lack of time as anything. I think a third column with guidance/references would be most valuable.
- Reflected recommendations like http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/NetCDF,_HDF,_and_ISO_Metadata in terms of the skeleton, but considered them more guidance than something we could require at this stage. (Small steps.)

Other changes broadly described:
- Geospatiotemporal: Now much more explicit about the geospatiotemporal attributes
- Lineage: Now much more explicit about possible forms for this information.

As someone who works a lot with rich structured metadata, I like the flexibility this new approach gives to do that. Conversely, I don't think it shuts down any of the less formal providers/documenters of metadata. I'll be curious to see your inputs.

John

[1] http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_(ACDD)_Working
[2] http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Talk:Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_(ACDD)_Working 
[3] We might want to move deletions into a deprecated section, so that they are allowed for backwards compatibility.

======================================  (Past email thread, for reference)

In any case I will be tossing some additional specific text for each term on the working page (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_(ACDD)_Working).  Please take that page into account as you go forward.

There is a conflict in short-term and longer-term strategies, which I'll summarize here.  One can either have a flat list of attributes, or a list that supports rich relationships (groupings and descriptions of them), or a hybrid that cobbles together a way to show rich relations in a flat list. This especially affects contacts and their roles.  I classify it as short-term vs long-term, because I'm sure someday we'll want to migrate to the richer relations approach (or at least a hybrid), but I understand that time may not be now.

The other connected issue that keeps popping up is use of controlled vocabularies, where you can either specify *one* vocabulary a priori for each field, or include a vocabulary field for every attribute that calls for CV terms, or allow the use of fully unique CV terms within any of these attributes. This is somewhat affected by whether your attribute list is flat or rich.

I will add my comments on these two topics to the discussion page, but they have a strong bearing on the best integration approach.

John

On May 9, 2013, at 09:07, David Neufeld - NOAA Affiliate <david.neufeld at noaa.gov> wrote:

> John,
> 
> Thanks for getting this started, I've added some information on governance.
> 
> Seems like a next step would be for Rich, Aleksandar, Ted and I to review the working draft and document some of the tweaks that crept into ncISO over the past year outside of ACDD.  Then we can discuss whether some (or all?) of those changes could be incorporated into the standard.
> 
> http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Category:Attribute_Conventions_Dataset_Discovery
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:20 PM, John Graybeal <graybeal at marinemetadata.org> wrote:
> Thanks Derrick. I'll try to get to this sometime this weekend -- with the login snafus (I think all better now) I got delayed.
> 
> I like the Category page strategy. I think you're creating a convention or profile or specification; for it to be a standard I arbitrarily would say it has to go through a standards body. 
> 
> Re versions: First, since the wiki versions pages, what we _don't_ want to do is create a page called 1_1, and then 1_2, and so on…  I think we want two pages though:
>   Attribute_Conventions_Dataset_Discovery_Final (or Current) -- this is the most recent agreed version; the version number is visible internally
>   ACDD_Working -- this is where we have the working version (keeping in mind there is also a Discussion page)
> 
> If we're debating some points that can go on the discussion page, and so we can keep the main ACDD_Working page relatively clean, just minor suggestions or questions there.
> 
> How does that sound?
> 
> John
>   
> 
> 
> On Apr 26, 2013, at 11:31, Derrick Snowden - NOAA Federal <derrick.snowden at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> All,
>> 
>> Just to get the ball rolling I created two new pages on the ESIP Wiki to host the output of this group.  The first page is a category page.  http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Category:Attribute_Conventions_Dataset_Discovery  I'm suggesting this as the home page and the page to use to reference the activities of the group, the approved standard (dare I call it a standard? convention?)  and things we are working on.  The benefit of using a category page as the home page is that any other wiki page you create will be listed on the main page if the new page includes
>> 
>> [[Category: Attribute Conventions Dataset Discovery]]
>> 
>> somewhere in the text of the page.  It is a convenience feature that I think will be useful.  I created the ACDD page as a subcategory of the "Documentation Cluster" so our work will show up on that page as well.  If you don't understand how MediaWiki handles categories now, I hope it'll make sense after you click around for awhile and experiment.  The key is including the category label somewhere in the text.
>> 
>> I created a second page (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/ACDD) that I think should hold the current version of what is essentially a controlled vocabularies.  John Graybeal volunteered to take a first stab at migrating the list from the current home on the NOAA EDM wiki  to this new page.  In the process he was going to add some of his interpretations of new definitions and possibly new terms.  I think this new page will represent a new version of the convention.  
>> 
>> You can see that I didn't really come up with a scheme for versioning the pages.  If someone has some ideas I'd love to hear them because it's something we should probably commit to sooner rather than later.
>> 
>> Have a good weekend.
>> 
>> Derrick
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Derrick Snowden
>> System Architect, US IOOS 
>> 1100 Wayne Ave, Suite 1225
>> Silver Spring, MD 20912
>> +1 301 427 2464 (o), +1 301 427 2073 (f)
>> 
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---------------
John Graybeal
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
graybeal at marinemetadata.org

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