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Standard Naming Exercise: Introduction

The Standard Naming Exercise, conducted by MBARI in 2004, tried to establish common naming practices for a wide range of oceanographic data (hundreds of variables).

Background

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, or MBARI, hosts a wide range of oceanographic science activities. With multiple platforms, most with many instruments, and a variety of ocean science applications, MBARI ends up with oceanographic data from different projects.

When the Adaptive Ocean Sampling Network project brought together many tens of platforms for a 2-month experiment in the Monterey Bay, the resulting data sets were equally diverse, if not more so. A number of data management professionals at MBARI and the Naval Postgraduate School got together to investigate normallizing naming conventions across the many data sets.

This work was originally hosted on the Marine Metadata Wiki at MBARI. It has been moved to this site to facilitate further work (as the original Wiki proved difficult to maintain) and consolidate the metadata development work. Some artifacts may remain from the old wiki, but hopefully do not detract from the usefulness of the site.

Overview and Introduction

This section describes the project: the ideas behind it, our goals for it (both the original notions, and the eventual agreed-upon goals), our planning, and the participation.

Standard Name Exercise Home: Overview of the Standard Naming Exercise conducted by MBARI in 2004.
Potential Goals: Potential Goals at beginning of Standard Naming Exercise
Exercise Goals: Goals for the Standard Name Exercise.
Detailed Plan: Detailed plan for Standard Naming Exercise.

Our participants came from multiple MBARI projects, as well as from the Naval Postgraduate School. Since this wasn't a formal project at MBARI, participation was voluntary, reflecting people's interests and available time.

Participants List: List of people involved in the meetings.

Inputs to the Process

The inputs consisted of references we were able to find, and documents we produced ourselves in preparation for the meeting.

StandardNamingUnitsReferences: Units references used in Standard Naming exercise
External Standards: Some of the External Standards identified for this exercise. (Replaced by MMI project material.)
Our Own Input Documents: Documents we produced for, or collected for use by, this exercise, .
OurSchema: The schema used by SSDS during the Standard Naming Exercise period.

Our Results

Results are of several forms: an agreed architecture or approach, actual naming conventions we settled on, and lessons we learned from the process. Not all of this information has been explicitly documented yet.

Documents we produced as a result of this exercise. (See our input documents above.)

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned: Lessons learned from the Standard Naming Exercise.
Domain Lessons Learned: Lessons we learned about domain naming.
Parameter Lessons: Lessons we learned about parameter naming.

Next Steps

We decided what to do next as we went along, which ensured maximum participation. We would edit the next steps document at each stage. This could then be used as the agenda for the next meeting.

Although there has been a hiatus, some members (OK, John) hope to continue this work as part of the Marine Metadata Interoperability project.

Next Steps

Next steps the group would like to take (live document).