Hello Jonathan, I'm finding myself in total agreement with you and hope to start demonstrate over the coming weeks how vocabulary server technology can cover both Martin's use case and the use case for whic you did your work.
Cheers, Roy. ________________________________________ From: Jonathan Gregory [j.m.greg...@reading.ac.uk] Sent: 24 September 2012 17:53 To: Schultz, Martin Cc: Lowry, Roy K.; cf-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Another potentially useful extension to the standard_name table Dear Martin, Roy et al. > I understand exactly what you want - or at least I thing I do. I think that > you would like to enter a URL representing the concept 'carbon monoxide' and > get back a document giving you all the Standard Names pertaining to carbon > monoxide. Am I right? I appreciate that this need is not the same one as a system for proposing new standard names, on which I agree with the way Philip described it. But couldn't both needs be served by a generating grammar? If we have a complete grammar of standard_names, then we can record in the standard_name table how each one is generated from phrases, as well as the final result. Although you cannot always parse a standard_name unambiguously, you could look up what the correct decomposition was, or search the table for the occurrence of a particular species or other phrase in the decompositions. Later we could take a step further by recognising that some names are irregular and giving their decomposition in regular terms. Thus, for instance, specific_humidity could be recognised as composed of the semantic elements which would normally yield mass_fraction_of_water_vapor_in_air (which does not occur in fact). This is somewhat like Martin's idea of aliases for irregular names. It is like recognising that "went" = go + -ed. Of course, there is plenty of linguistic theory about this kind of thing! My grammar does not currently have such transformational rules. Best wishes Jonathan-- This message (and any attachments) is for the recipient only. NERC is subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the contents of this email and any reply you make may be disclosed by NERC unless it is exempt from release under the Act. Any material supplied to NERC may be stored in an electronic records management system. _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
