[Esip-documentation] Minutes / handling of ACDD guidance

[Bob Simons - NOAA Federal]

I'm not sure if you are suggesting "guidance" icons and guidance text
for ACDD 1.3.  If so, I think it is a very bad idea. It sounds
reasonable, but I think it will effectively become a source of
unofficial, frequently changing, not voted upon, de facto changes to
the ACDD 1.3 standard.  If we're going to make changes (such as the
currently suggested changes to geospatial_lat/lon_resolution), then
let's start a changes list for a proposed ACDD 1.4.


On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 11:54 AM, John Graybeal via Esip-documentation
<esip-documentation at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:
> I'm not sure what it means to say "the ACDD documentation would be amended",
> or whether that's a final decision. But I have a proposal intended to
> address this question, and avoid other process debates peeking their heads
> up....
>
> As this thread every so often gets questions about the meaning/application
> of ACDD, indicating the specification is being actively used (yay) and not
> every answer is self-explanatory (shocking :->).  I propose we create a an
> ACDD guidance page, which could briefly explain best practices and
> understandings as they are derived in the emails.
>
> In the present example, the page could include the facts that:
> * the lat/lon/vertical resolution variables only should be used if there is
> a grid of observations in that axis
> * tools typically construe a value without units to be the same units as the
> units given by geospatial_lat/lon/vertical_units
> * values following the form "number units" should use UDUNITS-compatible
> units if they are to be understood by tools,
> and possibly, depending on how the conversation unfolds,
> * lat/lon resolutions should only be given for georectified grids (list of
> acceptable georectified units would be helpful here).
>
> (If the idea that resolution attributes should not include units takes hold,
> that would require an update to the spec. We don't seem to be heading that
> direction though.)
>
> Perhaps we could even agree that a small help icon in the main document's
> attributes table could be added whenever a guidance topic is added, without
> changing the ACDD specification version.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> John
>
>
>
> On Feb 26, 2015, at 11:37, Ted Habermann via Esip-documentation
> <esip-documentation at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> These are the minutes for today's meeting. I will get them on the
> Wiki/commons ASAP...
>
> Ted
>
> Documentation Cluster Minutes - February 2015
>
> The Documentation cluster meeting was delayed a week then held two hours
> early (sorry about the confusion caused by Ted).
> Nevertheless, we had an interesting discussion.
>
> 1. Resolution and units
> There was a long email thread yesterday started by Aaron Sweeny about how
> horizontal resolutions were described in netCDF and in the ACDD
> documentation. There was confusion caused by the recommendation that
> resolution strings in ACDD have the form “number units”. The current
> transform translates this into invalid ISO because the ISO value includes
> the entire string and it is expected to be a numeric value (needs to be
> checked). There is also a situation in an NODC template where, for point
> data, the resolution is recommended to be the string “point”. This also
> causes problems related to the type of the result in ISO.
>
> It was decided that the ACDD documentation would be amended to include that
> fact that, if the resolution is given without units, it is assumed to be the
> same as the unit given by geospatial_lat/lon_units.
>
> 2. A way forward
>
> Aaron is also interested in how Sea Data Net attributes can be translated
> from netCDF to ISO. The only recommendation for a way forward involved
> branching the ncISO xsl (in gitHub at
> https://github.com/Unidata/threddsIso/tree/master/src/main/resources/xsl/nciso)
> to include those attributes as input. This branch could then be described on
> the ACDD pages in the ESIP wiki. The SeaDataNet metadata page is at
> http://www.seadatanet.org/Standards-Software/Metadata-formats.
>
> 3. Metadata Recommendations and Dialects
>
> Ted reported briefly on the work he has been doing with tools for comparing
> metadata recommendations and dialects. Early versions of these tools are at:
>
> http://ec2-54-149-127-50.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:443/drTool/
>
> http://ec2-54-149-127-50.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:443/recTool/ and
>
> http://ec2-54-149-127-50.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:443/dialectTool/
>
> Maybe next month we will have more time for a complete description of this
> work...
>
> 4. Linked Data Dataset Description
>
> Ted reported on some recent metadata developments in the W3C Health Care and
> Life Sciences Working Group. This group is working on a profile for dataset
> descriptions that brings together many commonly used linked data namespaces.
> The Editors Working Draft of this profile is at
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/hcls-dataset/. Ted is working on
> crosswalks from that profile to metadata dialects that are commonly used in
> the Earth sciences.
>
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-- 
Sincerely,

Bob Simons
IT Specialist
Environmental Research Division
NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
99 Pacific St., Suite 255A      (New!)
Monterey, CA 93940               (New!)
Phone: (831)333-9878            (New!)
Fax:   (831)648-8440
Email: bob.simons at noaa.gov

The contents of this message are mine personally and
do not necessarily reflect any position of the
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