EML issues

[Peter McCartney]

I don't think there would be any difficulty recruiting a new member to
EML dev from the LTER community that would take this task on if there is
currently no one doing it now. I just wanted to check first. There are
several good candidates, draw from those that have expressed interest in
this issue - Margaret OBrien who has actually posted to bugzilla, linda
Powell, and probably others. We will hold the workshop on this in
Montreal and will plan to identify someone to handle this. there are
resources to bring someone from NCEAS if appropriate.

On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 16:23 -0900, Matt Jones wrote:
> Hey Peter,
> 
> I'm starting to surface again after a bout of grant-writing. Sorry for 
> the delay.
> 
> I think the working group for units is a great idea.  The current unit 
> dictionary is good, but it lacks consistency and I believe it still has 
> numerous errors.  Critically reviewing it, revising it, and adding as 
> many new units as we can discover would be a great thing.
> 
> I can try to get someone from SEEK to follow through with the changes to 
> the unit dictionary if the set of changes needed was clear.   It might 
> take a bit to find enough time, but we'll get it done eventually.  It 
> would be a good activity for the SEEK postdoc from the KR group who is 
> developing ontologies, but since Rich Williams left that position is 
> vacant. Maybe the position will be full by the Montreal meeting (if I 
> get my act together and recruit!)  But if there were a volunteer from 
> the LTER community who wanted to compile the changes into the STMML 
> format of the unitDictionary and integrate it, that would be more than 
> welcome.
> 
> We should (simultaneously) pursue the idea of a clearinghouse for unit 
> definitions, but that can probably be folded into the idea of one or 
> more ontology repositories as we have been discussing in SEEK.  The EML 
> unitDictionary really expresses semantic relationships between units in 
> quantitiative terms -- it represents a simple ontology unto itself, and 
> it is nicely unambiguous because the relationships are quantitative. So, 
> given that we want to be able to access remote ontologies from in the 
> seek tools (like Kepler), we should be able to make sure this approach 
> accomodates quantitative ontologies like the unit dictionary.
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt
> 
> Peter McCartney wrote:
> > Matt.
> > 
> >  Im in the IMEXEC meeting. yesterday we discussed the concern shared by
> > several sites with expanding the units dictionary. I tried to summarize
> > some of the discussion we have had about impoving how we handle
> > enumerated lists and dictionaries in EML. there is an interest in
> > holding a working group at the next IM meeting in montreal to compile a
> > comprehensive list of unit definitions. Ive suggested that we follow
> > Margaret OBrien's example of submitting a list in a bug which they agree
> > is a reasonable simple approach, but would like to ensure that we can
> > provide for someone to do the follow up to make sure they get into the
> > dictionary. Is there someone specifically handling this that we can
> > invite to the meeting, or should we be thinking of identifying someone
> > to do that follow up? 
> > everyone is interested in a future solution like DAT file refresh
> > services, but recognizes that for now, doing a large batch update of the
> > dictinary would benefit people. 
>