CF Standard NamesStatus and

Development

Alison Pamment J.A.Pamment@rl.ac.ukAlison Pamment J.A.Pamment@rl.ac.uk

Overview Current status of CF standard

name table Process for agreeing standard

names Development needs

Current Status Currently 1039 names in table Represents approx 30% increase

in size of table over 12 months A further 40 proposed names are

agreed and ~30 are currently under discussion

Standard Name Process (1) All proposals for new standard names

must be made via the CF-Metadata mailing list

There are published guidelines for the construction of standard names

Proposals should include the unit and a definition

Standard Name Process (2) Discussion of proposals takes place

on the mailing list and all may participate

The aim is to achieve consensus The standard names manager acts as

moderator and keeps the discussion moving forwards

Standard Name Process (3) Names for which consensus has

been achieved are flagged as ‘accepted’ by the moderator Accepted names will go into the table at the

next bimonthly update Accepted names can be used immediately –

don’t have to wait for table update to take place

Standard Name Process (4) Where consensus cannot be reached

by discussion the moderator will ask the standard names committee to vote on the proposed names

The committee’s decision will be final All versions of the standard name

table and guidelines will be kept online

Development Needs – the problem Many standard name proposals are pretty

straightforward…BUT A minority of name proposals are

controversial and raise more questions than they answer

FOR EXAMPLE: For new name proposals how much

weight should be given to current usage in communities beyond CF?

Development Needs – the problem Should we use human readable

strings or opaque URIs that point to a definition?

Should we put the definition in the file?

Are standard names too long to be useful?

We need a standard names ‘philosophy’

Standard Name Philosophy Are the names aimed primarily at the

proposing community or to be easily understood by the whole CF community?

Human readable names certainly shouldn’t be misleading

CF standard names can never be all things to all people

Development Needs

How do we express the relationship between CF standard names and external vocabularies?

Currently we have GRIB and AMIP equivalences but they are out of date

NDG vocabulary server Tickets 24 + 27 + 29 + … :

‘common_concept’

Common_concept The proposal is to allow a ‘bundling’ of CF

metadata to include standard_name + other attributes, e.g, 2m temperature

The ‘bundle’ could consist of a standard_name alone

The bundle would have a scoped name and a URI that points to its definition

Need a way of defining the constraints on a common_concept definition (#29)

The URI could point to metadata not defined in CF (#27)

Common_concept

Registration of a common_concept would be quick (automated)

Another user could register a different scoped name for an existing common_concept but the URI would be identical

Common_concept would facilitate: The creation of short names Translation between standard_names and

other vocabs

Other Development Needs Instrument information – should it go

in the standard name? Chemistry names (IUPAC?) Ticket 17: use cell_methods instead

of ‘where’ names Ticket 33: ‘count over days’ for use

with standard names for climate statistics

Summary Agreed rules for standard names

proposals will be published on CF website

We need to develop a clear standard names ‘philosophy’

The common_concept idea has received unanimous support in principle – there is much work to do on the practical implementation