compval next steps - a utility in the ecosystem

[aradhakrishnanGFDL]

We need compval as an individual tool/utility in the catalog builder ecosystem in a pythonic accessible format (as a module and as a CLI tool). This is a pre-requisite to the documentation issue #103.

The vocabulary attribute in the JSON schema has always existed in the data catalog, though intake-esm never used it to do internal validations or for the "aggregations". I understand that this was meant to provide info to users and applications for them to interpret and use it as they see fit.

Once this issue is complete, we can revisit the topic of whether or not this validation needs to happen in the builder, or we provide a tool for community contributions so applications such as fre-cli analysis, MDTF can utilize this as a python module (or) if we want to introduce an option --strict.

[ceblanton]

Thanks all. This makes sense to me too. The intake-esm community hasn't quite adopted the "value validation" so our catalog toolchain should not presume it's standard use for now, but allow it's use with a --strict option perhaps until it has more community buy-in.