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oceansites / software

Collection of software utilities and code in a variety of languages to search, create, manipulate or generally 'use' OceanSITES data
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Ship code lookup tabel #9

Open jkarstensen opened 2 years ago

jkarstensen commented 2 years ago

The ICES ship code can be retrieved here https://vocab.ices.dk/?ref=315 This is a data base that is a live-document and updated when new entries come in. From this point of view it makes no sense to download a copy but better link to the data base search engine?

ngalbraith commented 2 years ago

Here's my rationale for suggesting that we could use an ICES code lookup for ships’ names.

The ICES codes can be difficult to search on line; they include every type of ship imaginable - tugs, ferries, ocean liners. On the ices.dk site, the ship's name is in a field called 'Description' and there is no search capability on that field.

The terms are also available at http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/search_nvs/, which is much more user-friendly. There, you can search on a ship's name. That's a big improvement, but can also fail pretty easily, unless you already know the ICES 'official' name for the ship. We've had a lot of cruises on the Ronald H. Brown, variously referred to in our documentation as Ron Brown, Ronald Brown, R/V Ronald H. Brown, etc. - these all fail on the NERC server, you must use the ICS-blessed name. 'Brown' also works, but returns 5 different ships - hard to automate something like that.

If we want to update our netCDF metadata, it would simplify the process if we could convert the vernacular ship names - from a netCDF or from another source, like a supplementary metadata file - to the ICES name for the ship as well as the ICES code. This could be done in an automated process, using the NERC server or a local copy of the ICES database, much more easily than having to manually search for these codes on ices.dk.

For the same reason, I supplied some code that takes vernacular terms for instruments (sea-cat, seacat, scat, sbe16, sbe-16, sbe 16) and returns the 'official' name, 'SBE 16', and the L22 code, 'TOOL0023'. I do this using an XML file containing local names for instruments, paired with downloaded terms from the L22 codes. The XML is easily edited with any text editor, so other people can add their vernacular terms and/or any other instruments they'd like.