Observations About This Process

Thoughts about the process during the course of completing the assignment.
-- Agenda -- Workshop Home -- Materials --


-- Observations re Standard -- Process Observations -- Questions -- Survey --


This file documents the results of the team working on this assignment.

Comments may address anything related to the workshop process. (Comments about the standard should be entered on the observations page.)

Positive

The following aspects of the process were positive.

Negative

The following aspects of the process were negative.

Neutral

The following aspects of the process just were.

General Obervations and Notes

CTD

  • The Process:

  • Instrument Category was clear. Insitu category applies here. For at least one member, the category definitions were required to clarify the Category.

  • Instrument Classes:

  • We had difficulty selecting Instrument Class. The Instrument Class as currently described, contains types of instruments (e.g., Current/Wind meters), type of platforms (e.g., Profiler/Sounder), and sampling schemes (e.g., Corers, Samplers). This results in a single instrument (e.g., CTD) possibly being in four different Instrument Classes.

  • Instrument Short_Name:

  • Short_Name is a required field. Short_Name provides the link to the DIF record. One realization the group made was that in order to facilitate the search, the Short_Name needs to be generic; not a specific name (e.g., including the model number).

This also made us realize the levels of metadata. For example, at the acquisition level metadata should include details such as processing coefficients, while such details are not required at the data discovery level.

Some field labels were noted as being difficult to interpret due in part to the ordering of the words (eg. Instrument_Associated_Sensors vs. Sensors_on_Instrument)

Online_Resource should have a web link to a generic description of the instrument. This is because the AD-I record describes a generic instrument (e.g., CTD), not a specific model.

Creation date is validated against the ISO 8601 date format.

IDN_Node – for NASA internal use.

Instrument_Logistics and Spectral/Frequency Information only apply to unique instruments (e.g., satellites). This is an element that does not apply to commercial instrumentation (e.g., insitu instruments). Instrument_Logistics is describing a specific rather than a generic instrument. This indicates an inconsistency within the AD-I, that has resulted because of its development for satellites, rather than insitu instruments.

Synonymous instrument was recommended as an addition to the AD-I structure.

The metadata was invariant for these particular use cases because the platform field was not required and was one of the DIF search parameters. Therefore, multiple platforms could be associated with a single instrument class. This means the single AD-I record covers all use cases.

GPS

Back to the content level Short_Name under Instrument as a discussion point. Short_Name must be unique within current AD-I definition. Generic name but it is unique.

Short_Name under instrument has generated the most discussion for this evaluation. Since it is a class description, the AD-I doesn’t change for different platform mounting of the GPS.

Searching the catalogue: Science parameters not useful here. Must go directly to instrument search. There is no parameter “latitude” so it is not possible to approach the search from a parameter perspective.

ADCP

Created generic ADCP Instrument Class.

CODAR

Insufficient time to complete this.

Posted November 30th, 2006 by graybeal