[CF-metadata] a different (but perhaps unoriginal) approach to standard name construction

[Robert Muetzelfeldt]

Hi Stephen,

I think it would be a big mistake to jump to RDF from the current 
'flat-string plus attributes'.  What do people have against a 
straightforward XML-based markup language?  I've demonstrated (my email 
of 28th Oct) that there can be a simple mapping on to the construction 
rules for existing names, it's reasonably readable, and it lends itself 
to machine processing.  

The example that I find useful to keep in front of us is that of 
plain-text equations and Content MathML.   They both encode the same 
information, but many maths packages use MathML (rather than plain text, 
or, heaven forbid, RDF) because it is a good balance between 
representing structure explicitly, readability and machine processability. 

Cheers,
Robert

Pascoe, S (Stephen) wrote:
>  
> Here's an idea that people will either love or hate.  What about
> defining a convention for embedding RDF triples in NetCDF, in a similar
> fashion to what RDFa does in XHTML.  This way we could leverage the full
> richness of RDF to describe our relationships.  The same mechanism would
> work in NetCDF, NCML and OpeNDAP because of their shared data model.
>
> The downside is that processing RDF is cumbersome without specialist
> libraries and tools.
>
> Cheers,
> Stephen.             
>
> ---
> Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
> British Atmospheric Data Centre
> Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu
> [mailto:cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of John Caron
> Sent: 03 November 2008 15:33
> Cc: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
> Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] a different (but perhaps unoriginal) approach
> to standard name construction
>
> I would propose that we dont replace the current standard_name
> attribute, but explore alternative representations of their  semantics.
> The goal would be to clarify the relationships of the various semantic
> components of a standard quantity, and to explore possible grammers for
> generating the name. 
>
> While the end product of CF Conventions is to create specific metadata
> to be placed in data files, I think we often limit our thinking to the
> rather small set of representational forms that can be encoded into the
> netCDF-3 (aka classic) data model. 
>
> To be specific, standard names are limited to being represented as char
> attributes, and so our dialogue about them sometimes seems limited to
> sequential "flat space" concepts. Of course actually we have an
> extremely rich associative semantic linkage in our minds. 
>
> The idea, for me, would be to look for some richer representations of
> the associations and relationships between standard quantities, which
> could accelerate the process of constructing them. We can then decide if
> we want to encode these in a netcdf file using a single standard_name
> attribute and/or multiple "standard_name_component" attributes,
> auxiliary coordinates, common concepts, or even (god forbid) rdf
> triples.
>
> So I think we should start trying out different representations, and not
> make any big decisions, until/unless we have something that we like.
>
> Ok, I lied about the rfd triples inside of netcdf, that's not ok. ;^)
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