Repository overview
Repository overview#
The repository captures two key pieces of information.
Controlled vocabularies#
The first is the controlled vocabularies (CVs) used within the input4MIPs project.
The CVs define the allowed terms which can be used for various pieces of metadata.
The precise rules are still somewhat fuzzy
and these CVs should be considered a work in progress,
however they do provide much more structure than nothing.
These live in the CVs
directory.
These CVs are specific to the input4MIPs project. They supplement the 'global' CVs, which can be found in the MIP CMOR tables repository. As much as possible, we rely on the 'global' CVs and attempt to avoid duplicating information. However, the 'global' CVs are currently under heavy development, so there is some duplication at the moment. We hope to reduce this over time. When in doubt, the CVs in this repository will be the source of truth for the input4MIPs project.
Finally, the CVs also have some reliance on other conventions. The most notable is the CF metadata conventions. We also use cfchecker for validating files. Where the CVs make use of other conventions, we make this as clear as possible. However, this is also a work in progress.
Files database#
The second key piece of information is a database of the files we know about within the input4MIPs project.
At the moment, this database is stored as a JSON file within this repository,
Database/input4MIPs_db_file_entries.json
(although this may change in future, if this solution doesn't scale well).
This database provides a record of the files known to the input4MIPs project,
given that the ESGF index is not publicly queriable
(nor perfectly suited to input4MIPs data,
which does not always conform to the ESGF's data model,
e.g. sometimes there is more than one variable in a file).
To ease exploration of the database, we provide a few pre-prepared views of the database, see database views.