Using Metadata Profiles in Rosetta - Unidata/rosetta GitHub Wiki

The intent of this document is to describe how the information in the various Metadata Profile xml files should be used by the wizard interface of Rosetta.

Which metadata profiles to use?

• By default, CF profile is selected.
• For Atmospheric Sciences community, use CF
• For Physical Ocean Sciences community, use CF and NCEIv2
• For Bio-Logging, use CF, NCEIv2
  • additionally, if platform is eTag, also include eTuff

If no community is chosen and "Advanced: Input CF Type" is used, use CF by default, and allow users to select other profiles from a series of checkbox elements (although CF must always be selected).

Where in the wizard interface to use the different types?

The Metadata Item Attribute metadataType serves as the top level discriminator as to how these items should be used

• Global indicates that the Metadata Item Attribute describes a piece of Global Metadata, and should be collected in the "Specify General Information" (/generalMetadata) step.
• Both CoordinateVariable and DataVariable indicates that the Metadata Item Attribute describes a piece of metadata related to a variable, and should be collected in the "Specify Variable Attributes" (/variableMetadata) step.
  • Differentiation between CoordinateVariable and DataVariable is made on a per-variable basis in the metadata entry pop-up as part of the slickgrid view ("Is this a coordinate variable: yes/no").
  • A DataVariable is for anything marked as a non-coordinate variable
  • A CoordinateVariable can be broken down into the kind of coordinate variable one is dealing with (i.e. lat, lon, depth, time). These "flavors" of CoordinateVariable are found in the metadataTypeStructure Metadata Item Attribute, and are set on a per-variable basis in the metadata entry pop-up as part of the slickgrid view ("What type of coordinate variable?").
    • No special handling needed - just handle all flavors of time as CoordinateVariable. Special note: If "Full Date and Time String", "Date Only" or "Time Only" is selected in the wizard interface to describe the coordinate variable "flavor", the wizard should treat the varaible as a DataVariable rather than a CoordinateVariable. These types of "coordinate variables" are not actually stored in the converted file as "coordinate variables", but rather are used to construct a coordinate variable representing time; these will always need to be handled special.
• MaskVariable entries can be ignored by the wizard interface.

Duplicates?

There are often cases of duplication between various Metadata Profiles. For example, the Global Metadata attribute "title" is used in CF, NCEIv2, and ACDD. The interface only needs to ask the user for the attribute once. Implicit is the assumption that the attribute title means the same across the different profiles. This is a much larger problem that we can tackle here, so for the time being we will simply pick one programatically, whichever is easiest in the code.

Auto-computed attributes (don't ask the user for these)

Some metadata attributes can be auto-computed from the data, or are part of the process of actually writing the converted netCDF file and thus do not need to be collected via the wizard interface. It's also the case the the wizard collects some of these based on the selection users make in other parts of the wizard. "Required" metadata items with the following attributes can be ignored from any Metadata Profile:

metadataType	attributeName
CoordinateVariable	axis
CoordinateVariable	coverage_content_type
CoordinateVariable	_FillValue
CoordinateVariable	valid_min, valid_max
DataVariable	_FillValue
DataVariable	coordinates
DataVariable	coverage_content_type
Global	featureType
Global	conventions
MetadataGroup*	geospatial_lat_start
MetadataGroup*	geospatial_lon_start
MetadataGroup*	time_coverage_start
MetadataGroup**	geospatial_lat_end
MetadataGroup**	geospatial_lon_end
MetadataGroup**	time_coverage_end

* eTuff profile, metadataGroup deployment ** eTuff profile, metadataGroup end_of_mission

alt-text for <img src="resources/img/help.png">

We have little question mark icons throughout the wizard interface, which have an alt-text that is used to describe what the user should do or what we are asking for (description of the question being asked, the metadata element description, etc.). Each Metadata Profile Item may have description and/or exampleValues attributes that can be used to create the alt-text string. If only one of those attributes exists, use it; if both attributes exists, concatenate them following the form:

description. examples: exampleValues.