[Esip-documentation] Let's get rid of spatial and temporal bounds in ACDD

[David Neufeld - NOAA Affiliate]

Second!  I've seen this issue enough times to recognize that the benefit of
a human configured/readable attribute is outweighed by the maintenance and
generally error prone nature of this approach (aka copy paste mistakes).

-Dave


On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Signell, Richard <rsignell at usgs.gov> wrote:

> Gang,
> I was just burned by gespatial and temporal bounds in ACDD again, and
> it took us a while to find, so I'm irritated enough to get up from my
> Friday afternoon office nap and write this message.  ;-)
>
> The problem is that as soon as someone subsets or aggregates data from
> netcdf or opendap datasets that use ACDD, the ACDD attributes in the
> resulting dataset are wrong.   Since we subset and aggregate data all
> the time, the ACDD metadata is often wrong.   The only way to correct
> this would be to ensure that *all* clients that subset or aggregate
> NetCDF or OpenDAP data modify the ACDD attributes in the output
> datasets.   Yeah, right! ;-)
>
> Since we already have CF compliant data, we have the information to
> calculate the bounds from the coordinate variables.  So the temporal
> and geospatial bounds can be accurately calculated by tools like
> ncISO, which generates ISO metadata.   And if we subset or aggregate
> the data and serve *that* up, ncISO will still generate the proper
> bounds.
>
> So I propose we stop saying that these properties at:
>
> http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_1-1
> are "Recommended" and start saying "Not Recommended" for all
> attributes that involve coordinate variables:
>
> geospatial_bounds
> geospatial_lat_min
> geospatial_lat_max
> geospatial_lon_min
> geospatial_lon_max
> geospatial_vertical_min
> geospatial_vertical_max
> time_coverage_start
> time_coverage_stop
> time_coverage_duration
> time_coverage_resolution
>
> Do I have a second?   :-)
>
> -Rich
> --
> Dr. Richard P. Signell   (508) 457-2229
> USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd.
> Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598
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