Issue 65 in ioostech: Representation of missing/unknown metadata

[ioos...@googlecode.com]

Status: New
Owner: ----
Labels: Type-Defect Priority-Medium

New issue 65 by noaa...@gmail.com: Representation of missing/unknown
metadata
http://code.google.com/p/ioostech/issues/detail?id=65

It is not clear what to do when available metadata is insufficient to
populate all fields in an IOOS SOS response, e.g. DescribeSensor: do not
report the field, report it but leave it empty, or fill it with "UNKNOWN"
value. For example, the 52N CeNCOOS implementation either completely drops
a sponsor info classifier(DescribeSensor/network), or returns the
classifier itself
(XPath=/sml:SensorML/sml:member[1]/sml:System[1]/sml:classification[1]/sml:ClassifierList[1]/sml:classifier[4]/sml:Term[1]/@definition)
but does not provide any value (DescribeSensor/station).

I believe that in this case we should use "UNKNOWN" value to fill in the
fields rather than just leave them empty; as far as I know, the ncSOS does
exactly that.

Shane, however, holds another opinion: a lot of potentially unknown or
inapplicable metadata attributes can bloat a response, so these fields
should stay just empty.

We need to develop a general IOOS policy for that issue to make sure that
various implementations treat it equally.


--
You received this message because this project is configured to send all
issue notifications to this address.
You may adjust your notification preferences at:
https://code.google.com/hosting/settings

[ioos...@googlecode.com]

Comment #1 on issue 65 by sh...@axiomalaska.com: Representation of
missing/unknown metadata
http://code.google.com/p/ioostech/issues/detail?id=65

I don't too feel strongly about this, but I wonder if we need a convention
here at all, or if clients should just check for the existence of the
metadata field. Maybe the best thing to do would be to match the
CF/ACDD/etc convention for netCDF attributes. In netCDF, if an attribute
doesn't apply or has an unknown value, is the convention to omit that
attribute entirely or to add it with an "UNKNOWN" value?