Talk:Air Quality/Chemistry Naming Conventions

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

What links here: Air Quality/Chemistry Naming Conventions

General discussion on Air Quality/Chemistry Naming Conventions. If needed, parctice editing in the Sandbox
  • To add to the discussion, log in to DataFed wiki
  • Begin each entry with ====Username: Subject====
  • To respond, add dots ====......Username: Subject====
  • Indent response text by adding : for each tab.
  • Sign your entry by ending with '~~~~',








I am in charge to organise the definition of new names for the CF convention, both as an outcome of our Ispra HTAP meeting as well as by the EU-project GEMS. Do you have any information on what the status of naming conventions for aerosol&chemicals is? I have recently sent an email to Jonathan Gregory and Bryan Lawrence (see below), but did receive a reponse yet. ChristianeTextor 19:26, 10 May 2006 (EDT)


Thank you for your note on CF naming extensions. Your work will be a very important part of developing interoperability among projects, programs, agencies and countries. Given the formal consensus-based procedures and the broad acceptance of the CF conventions in the met/ocean communities, it is a very attractive model for creating an Air Chemistry extension to the existing Standard Names.
In order to collect the information on this topic, we have set up this wiki page. It lists the standard air chemistry names in the CF convention (as of April 7, 2006). It is evident that the current list is very limited and it clearly requires expansion to accommodate the needs of this HTAP/GEMS project as well as the needs for other air quality/chemistry-related names.
I do not have a direct interaction with the CF naming custodians, however I gather from the website that there is a particular e-mail address where naming requests are submitted. The wiki page on air quality/chemistry naming also contains links three additional standard name collections:
  • EPA Air Quality System (AQS)
  • Supersite Project Naming Standards
  • PRISM Project Naming Standards
I hope that this information will be of use. Clearly this is a major and thankless undertaking since it is so hard to do it "right" for every one's satisfaction. In order to distribute labor we have set up the above wiki pages where interested work group participants can enter links as well as descriptions through the open wiki process. If you would prefer to maintain such an interactive web page as part of your GEMS project we would be more than happy to make our contributions to those pages. Rhusar 19:30, 10 May 2006 (EDT)

I think your idea with the wiki pages is great! For exchanging and establishing ideas on standards and tools for the intercomparison work in an interactive way. Thanks a lot for pointing us to this.
At this point, in the beginning, it would be really important to choose a representative entry point. Which has some longer life time. which es even not linked too much to an infividual organisation. Otherwise a discussion on standards makes no sense. I think also GEMS is not the right thing, since it is a project and by definition will end in some years.
So I have some questions ( also to the colleagues):
1. Is ESIP the right federation to keep this? (I have not heard of it before)Isnt that purely american?
2. Wouldn't it be better to have for example an IGAC administrated wiki page? I must admit that I find it nice to just start and may be we can copy everything to another place once we found it.
3. Who will be the administrator and can create new pages for example in your initial set-up?
4. Who can change to general outline of these pages? I think there is always too much meta communication on how to edit and who has edited and when etc on these wiki pages.
5. Is there and administrator at ESIP who would react within a day or two if we had small wishes? Michael Schulz (MichaelSchulz) 13:21, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

1. Location of the Workspace. I am in full agreement with all the key items you raised. Picking an agencey/nationally neutral work-space is vital for the 'political corecteness' of these efforts, like HTAP.
2. Longevity of the Workspace. Having a workspace for interoperability discussions and content management that has longevity beyond typical project lifetimes is indeed highly desireable.

Response

I agree that a discussion on the guidelines for chemistry and aerosol names is needed in order to satisfy the needs of as many people as possible. And this is a good start!

A wiki page for this discussion would be very useful, but we should agree on only one page of the two I am aware of: 1)http://home.badc.rl.ac.uk/lawrence/cf from Bryan Lawrence, or the 2)Talk:Air_Quality/Chemistry_Naming_Conventions Rudulf Husar has set up this wiki page "Air Quality/Chemistry Naming Conventions".

As a first step I will now go through the material I gathered, write up a proposal for a list of new names, which can serve as a basis for these discussions, and send it to the wiki page we agreed on. ChristianeTextor 16:05, 15 May 2006 (EDT)


Thanks for bringing us up to date on the on the CF naming for Air Chemistry topic. A few comments and a suggestion.
  • It appears that the wiki is an agreeable tool to conduct much of the communication, cooperation and coordination for this work group
  • However, as Michael Schulz properly notes, such a work-space (1) should be at a 'neutral' web-space and (2) have assurance for longevity.
  • We are not in position commit to the long-term physical maintenance of the wiki site. Also, we are definitely not equipped to be managers/editors of a wiki contents.
Nevertheless, our view is that progress along the naming conventions is a necessary step toward broader interoperability, the same way as netCDF is for binary data encoding, an OGC Web Coverage Sevice(WCS) is for universal data queries. Within our own small group, we have 4-5 projects and collaborative activities that could benefit from these CF naming extensions. I am sure that most of us could use these conventions well beyond the current HTAP applications.
  • So, we would like to help bootstrapping this effort primarily through our accumulated tools/methods and experience in wiki-aided collaboration.
  • One possibility is to start with an experimental wiki site, and then transferring the contents to the neutral long-term site ASAP.
  • With the web-based wiki, 'managing' the contents (whatever that means for a wiki) could be transferred immediately to your group.
I am sure there are many viable alternative paths to pursue this, so please consider the above simply as a friendly offer for pooling resources an collaboration. Rhusar 16:08, 15 May 2006 (EDT)

PCMDI are in the process of configuring a new set of CF web pages including discussion fora (and possibly task tracking software) ... so in the very near future we expect the management of CF name changes etc to be more than just this mailing list. (Folks will recall that both PCMDI and BADC are contributing effort to try and get CF rolling forward without elying on the contributions of the original authors).
Hopefully Kyle is reading the list, and can give us an eta for wider use of the prototype he's got going at the moment. I think realistically though, Alison (based in the UK) and Kyle (based on the west coast of the US) will need to have a face-to-face chat about how to manage ongoing CF modifications before we get things working really well, and that's planned for mid-June.
If in the mean-time groups want to use wikis to get ideas sorted, then excellent. 128.252.167.79 16:09, 15 May 2006 (EDT)