backlog of CF standard name and other vocabulary issues

[JonathanGregory]

Dear all

Unfortunately we have at the moment quite a large backlog of open vocabulary issues (standard names and area types). There are 25 opened in the last year but not concluded, most of which haven't been added to the CF editor yet. There are some where no-one has yet replied to the initial proposer. On behalf of the committee, I apologise to those proposers whose proposals haven't progressed as we would like, including @ofauny @rlepper91 @jschap1 @sebhahn @nicholas512 @sol1105 @tommibergman @bethdingley @RosmerySosaG.

In cases where a discussion has occurred, and has reached a satisfactory conclusion without any outstanding concerns or further comments for at least a week, it's pretty safe to assume that the proposal will be accepted.

The backlog has arisen because of a shortage of person–time to work on the issues at the moment. As you know, CF is mostly a voluntary effort. The governnance panel is trying to find people who can help, but in the meantime and in any case, it's always helpful to have community contributions. The discussions of standard names often concern what the quantity is, precisely, and how to convey that meaning clearly to non-experts. They cover all realms of geoscience, and therefore expertise from all disciplines is valuable. Here is a list of issues where attention is needed, because no-one has contributed for a while.

I'd like to invite anyone who is willing to contribute a little time if they can, when there's an issue of relevance to them, to "Watch" the vocabularies repo, in order to be informed of issues in there, by selecting "All activity" from the drop-down menu on https://github.com/cf-convention/vocabularies as shown here:

Thanks very much for any help!

Jonathan

[japamment]

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for starting this discussion. I add my own apologies for the lack of recent progress on CF vocabularies. Over the next week, I will be going through as many as possible of the open issues, updating the CF editor, and marking as ready for acceptance those names where the discussion has already reached a satisfactory conclusion. I will also work to publish an update to to the standard name table within the next three weeks (exact date TBD).

Regarding effort available to help with standard names discussions, I echo Jonathan's appeal for people to comment on open issues in https://github.com/cf-convention/vocabularies . Please also see the announcement of a new member of the vocabularies moderator team who will be helping to address the recent backlog.

Best wishes,
Alison