[Esip-documentation] ACDD comments

[Signell, Richard via Esip-documentation]

John,

> * The summary is now recommended to include the geospatial coverage of the
> data, and the temporal coverage of the data. But "Maintenance of Metadata"
> acknowledges the importance of software tool revising the metadata,
notably
> the geospatiotemporal attributes when the dataset is modified. It is
> reasonable/possible for software tools to maintain e.g.,
geospatial_lon_min
> and max, but it is not reasonable to expect software tools to maintain the
> same values that occur within plaintext in the summary. Please remove the
> green sentence above.
>
>
> This was extensively discussed on multiple threads, and Maintenance of
> Metadata was the result. The plurality seem to favor leaving the green in,
> and I don't know of anyone other than yourself still requesting it be
> removed.

I think all Bob is asking is that bounding information not be contained in
the free-text "summary" attribute, which totally makes sense.  There would
be no programatic way to keep that up to date as the dataset is subset.

>
>
> * cdm_data_type should not be tied to
>
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/thredds/current/tds/catalog/InvCatalogSpec.html#dataType
> which is out-of-date and obsolete .


>
>
> Are you sure? I thought several on this list were still using it.

yes, ncISO uses cdm_data_type to decide how to calculate the bounds from
gridded or unstructured grid data.


> *** Deprecation is always a bad idea. It is far better to improve the
> definitions of existing attributes. CF understands this and has an
excellent
> history of not deprecating terms. ACDD should follow CF's example.  Those
of
> use who deal with the metadata for 1000's of datasets and for software
> really don't want changes that break the existing metadata in those
dataset
> and in that software.
>
>
> I think ACDD is an entirely different kind of standard than CF, in that
> attributes in ACDD are all recommended, whereas you can not use a CF name
> that is not in the vocabulary and still be compliant. So I don't think the
> analogy applies -- if someone still wants to use the old attributes, which
> people strongly felt had particular (conflicting) meanings, then they can
> still do so.

There are thousands of datasets what have ISO metadata content generated
from ACDD attributes via ncISO.    Would these ISO need to be regenerated,
or would deprecation mean making changes to ncISO?

Thanks,
Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard P. Signell   (508) 457-2229
USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598
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