Cryosphere Topic Hierarchy Proposal (level 8)

[chenxiaoxia2019]

Note: sections marked with * are required.

Overview of proposal*

WIS2 Node for Cryosphere data is installed in Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. ITP/CAS is now in progress of discussion of NFP on WIS matters for China about the centre-id. For the Cryosphere data, the Topic Hierarchy is proposed as below. They welcome any further discussion to refine and categorize beneath of it.

origin/a/wis2/centre-id/data/core/cryosphere/LEVEL-8/
• Glacier (Ice Sheet)
• Frozen Ground
• Lake Ice
• Surface Freeze-thaw Cycle/State Remote Sensing
• Snow
• Sea Ice
• Ice Shelf
• Iceberg
• Ice Crystal
• Supercooled Cloud Water
• Snowfall
• Hail
• Sleet
• Surface Freeze-thaw Cycle/State
• River Ice
• Others

Amendment details*

TBD

Requestor(s)*

Proposed by Dr Xin LI (xinli@itpcas.ac.cn), SC-IMT (2020-2023) member.

Consultations

(Individuals, groups,or organizations that are consulted. Also cite publications or other documents as references.)

Describe WIS2 data publication plans associated with the proposal

(identify relevant datasets, WIS2 Nodes, discovery metadata publication)

Comments

[amilan17]

sent email to Rodica for this request.

[tomkralidis]

2024-11-26

• ACTION: @ferrighi to check with Oystein to validate the concepts
• ACTION: @chenxiaoxia2019 to check with ITP/CAS on data publishing requirements

[golfvert]

I have 0 competence on the domain. However, before any/all of the above to become level 8 topics, they must be lowercased and all spaces removed.
Typically, Supercooled Cloud Water should be supercooled-cloud-water

[steingod]

The challenge of ambiguity in Topic Hierarchies still remain, so in general I am still not convinced Topic Hierarchy is useful at the practical level for cryosphere when multiple Topic Hierarchies are not allowed. The reason being that much of these data could also go under weather, climate, ocean or hydrology as there is a large overlap between these topics.

That being said, the proposal violates aspects of chapter 1.5 in the definition document for Topic Hierarchy. As mentioned by @golfvert concepts need to be lowercase, spaces replaced by '-' and although not covered by the definition document (as far as I can see) also parentheses should be removed for consistency (i.e. 'Glacier (Ice Sheet)' -> glacier-ice-sheet).

The proposed structure is very detailed with some inconsistency at the granularity level. Perhaps it is wise to start with a shorter list first and rather amend later if necessary? Such a short list (information in parantheses is comment, not part) could be e.g.:

• glacier-ice-sheet (covering moving parts on land)
• frozen-ground (covering permafrost etc)
• sea-ice (covering sea ice, icebergs etc)
• ice-shelves
• river-ice
• precipitation (covering snow, hail, sleet, etc)
• others

It could be further simplified from the use cases we have identified.

I would anyway believe that for most of these a discovery metadata search is more beneficial than Topic Hierarchies, thus I would at least suggest to keep it simple for now.