Dear all In standard names I think CF has generally followed Roy's no (2):
> 1) Create an idealised model with everything normalised and harmonised to the > nth degree, declare it as a standard and force everybody to conform. > 2) Accept community practice but make sure that everything is unambiguously > described. Interoperability then comes through the development of semantic > resources describing the relationships between the descriptions. That is, we try to describe what people actually use, rather than force them to use a particular thing. Doing the latter may not work and in the end means the standard is not adopted. That is why we have standard names for quantities which could be interconverted. On the other hand, in CF in general we also try to discourage unnecessary proliferation of choices, by not introducing new mechanisms if we already have ones that would serve a new purpose. I agree that a general mask would be a good way forward, but land/sea is such a common case, which we already support, that I think we should continue to support it. But we could also introduce a standard name for a general type mask, as Steve suggests. A data variable containing a mask with this standard name should have a string-valued scalar coordinate variable with standard name of area_type to specify it further. This is consistent with the idea behind introducing the area_type, which allows us to describe quantities that depend on area type without providing specific standard names for them. Cheers Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
