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

[John Graybeal]

On Mar 7, 2014, at 10:09, "Signell, Richard" <rsignell at usgs.gov> wrote:

> 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. 

*If the client is broken*, yes, the metadata will be wrong. Any client that passes through metadata that it has effectively changed is BROKEN. Why are you accepting obvious bugs from the broken clients?

I expand your rant  because the list of metadata which that client is breaking won't be limited to the geospatial category.  It's a safe bet that any of the following metadata fields are wrong too, if they exist:
- title
- summary
- history
- source (if the data was transformed in any way other than subsetting)
- processing_level (if transformations are involved)
- creator (and related)
- publisher (and related)
- license
- metadata_link
- time_coverage_resolution (this is a marker of intent, not necessarily derivable by examination of the file)
- uuid
- id
- naming_authority
While you're manually working with the selection of files that's maybe not a big deal, but at scale your collection of data will be a mess.

In the end, I don't care which category the geospatial parameters end up in -- they may be computationally expensive to recalculate, but that's affordable at least. 

But I care a lot that we don't push back more on the real problem -- bad metadata that's created by broken software -- because it makes data reuse impossible to scale. 

John