Migrate Canonical Parameter List to NVS

[DocOtak]

An effort is underway to migrate the canonical list of parameters to the NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS), doing this has significant advantages including:

• Ontological like mappings to different concepts within the NVS including broader names, exact equivalent names, and more specific names
• Each parameter is versioned
• Each parameter gets a persistent unambiguous URL/id
• Metadata available in several standard formats including XML, JSON-LD, and RDF
• Names would exist in the same system as SeaDataNet, CF, and Argo vocabularies (to name a few) that could all map to each other.

Those are just some of the more technical pros, perhaps the larger benefits are more organizational:

• Formal governance needs to be set up to maintain a list on the NVS, the exact structure is not defined by NERC.
• The processes and procedures for adding/updating/deprecating a name need to be documented and formalized
• We are starting talks with the US GO-SHIP Exec Chairs about how much involvement GO-SHIP wants to have in the process, a potential idea being to collect this formal reportable parameter information from the start of a Level 3/2 proposal.

Things that need to be worked out (that I can think of right now):

• What does the governance look like? This involves talks with GO-SHIP, CCHDO, NVS.
  • Lots of groups use GitHub (CF)
  • Who is involved with this governance?
    • I hope for some International GO-SHIP involvement.
• What information goes into the NVS and what stays external just at CCHDO?
  • WHP <-> CF netCDF variable name mappings (two lists for this?)
  • WHP -> CF standard name mapping (probably skos:exactMatch to P07)
  • (not currently done) Do we want WHP -> P01 mappings?
  • How do we handle different units for the same WHP name?
  • What about parameter groupings, parameters with angles and/or wavelengths?
  • Aliases?

This cchdo.params package itself would need to be updated to pull most or perhaps all of its information directly from the NVS, it would likely still be needed and useful to have as an installable package for operational purposes (and an offline mode?).