[Esip-documentation] ACDD convention

[John Graybeal]

And I fully agree with this perspective also, thanks Bob! (And hi!)

john

> On May 12, 2021, at 8:20 AM, Bob Simons - NOAA Federal via Esip-documentation <esip-documentation at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:
> 
> My personal answer to your questions is:
> 
> I think you may have a misunderstanding of the ACDD attributes with regard to compliance. ACDD (like CF) defines a set of attributes. Yes, they are categorized as  "highly recommended", "recommended" or "suggested", but note that none are "required". So one might say that, technically, a dataset with none of the ACDD attributes is compliant with ACDD. But it's better to say that a file or dataset is compliant if it uses the ACDD attributes (hopefully all of the "highly recommended"  and "recommended" and many of the others) in a way that is consistent with the attribute definitions. It is not an error or a sign of non-compliance if a dataset doesn't have one or more of the ACDD attributes. Note that some of the attributes simply are not relevant to some files, so those attributes simply shouldn't be used for that file. In that case, their absence is not an error. Also, ACDD (like CF) allows the file to have other attributes, perhaps from other conventions, so the presence of non-ACDD attributes is not an error or sign of non-compliance.. 
> 
> Regarding "the convention does not specify whether data is compliant with ACDD,"
> Basically correct. And there is no official ESIP ACDD compliance checker which looks at a file or dataset's metadata to determine its compliance. However, other groups have made compliance checkers (i.e., software): search the web for these. I think NOAA's IOOS has a compliance checker which includes ACDD. NOAA's NCEI's checker may also include ACDD checking. Note that compliance checkers mostly just say "better" for files that have more of the ACDD attributes (especially the "highly recommended" ones), and "worse" for files that have fewer ACDD attributes, which is what the checker's authors are seeking, but not strictly what the ACDD convention says. And note that compliance checkers currently aren't actually smart enough to evaluate if an attribute value is in compliance with the attribute's specification or to evaluate the quality of the metadata (e.g., does the "title" do a good job of describing the dataset or is it a cryptic code that only the creator understands?). In that sense, it will take AI to make a checker that tests true compliance. I think the only true non-compliance that one of the current checkers might catch is if an ACDD attribute is misspelled or has the wrong data type (e.g., text when a number is expected).
> 
> I hope that helps.
> 
> Best wishes.
> 
> 

----------------------
John Graybeal
Administrator—ESIP Community Ontology Repository
jbgraybeal at sonic.net



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