[Esip-documentation] updates to ACDD

[John Graybeal]

Hi Chris,

I believe there have been 3, maybe 4 threads in the past 2-3 years about updating ACDD. I wouldn't say any of them were as action-oriented as yours—sometimes interest in a particular attribute, other times general interest in whether it's being maintained. None has gone so far as to say "I want to open a new round of discussion for ACDD." The list archive may have some details. 

I note that nothing *precludes* your using those identifiers for the people or organizations in the contributor attributes, all those identifiers can be named via URLs, which is consistent with the ACDD spec. What are you trying to do exactly that isn't already possible?

Within the past week, there was a question in the #marinedata Slack channel of the ESIP workspace about ORCiDs in netCDF, followed by a long discussion about the ACDD 1.3 creator_url. In the course of that discussion it was mentioned that IOOS had recommended creator_url be
> The URL of the institution that collected the data. Note that this should always reference an institution URL, and not a personal URL, even if creator_type=person.

I wasn't there so I can't fairly assess that guidance, but it is sufficiently, umm, unexpected that it'd be nice to get your needs met by ACDD directly.

That said, two considerations about ACDD: (1) At the last update round, at least one major user would not accept any changes to existing ACDD attributes that would invalidate any use that followed a previous version. So our ability to update certain fields the way many members wanted to was effectively blocked. (2) With ESIP's Documentation Cluster(Committee?) as the current 'standards body' for ACDD, you'd be starting down a path that has not been travelled yet, to my knowledge.

I hope that is the right level of information to share in response to your query! I think it would be great for ACDD to get another round, especially if it was clear that a break from the past was necessary to improve metadata quality from what the current standard can support. Obviously that would open up quite a number of questions that just might go beyond your own interest. ;-)

John

> On Oct 11, 2021, at 1:02 PM, Chris Turner via Esip-documentation <esip-documentation at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm curious about any movement or interest to update the ACDD. I know that v1.3 is 6 years old, and the ESIP wiki makes it looks like there hasn't been interest or discussion in this since 2017. Is there still any intent to develop v2.0?
> 
> My sudden interest in this comes from the need to include identifiers (ORCID, ResearchID, AuthorID, etc) for the person listed in the creator attributes and the people listed in the contributor attributes. I'd like to do this in a community-vetted way, but but if there isn't an active community working on ACDD anymore, we can look at including these attributes in one of the netCDF community profiles - probably the the IOOS metadata profile <https://ioos.github.io/ioos-metadata/ioos-metadata-profile-v1-2.html>. 
> 
> Thanks for whatever you can tell me.
> 
> - Chris
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Turner
> Data Librarian | Axiom Data Science
> chris at axiomdatascience.com <mailto:chris at axiomalaska.com>
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----------------------
John Graybeal
Administrator—ESIP Community Ontology Repository
jbgraybeal at sonic.net



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