Format of Region, Scenario names, Variable names and Descriptions

[orichters]

I wonder whether it would make sense to define some standards for the naming of variables, model regions, scenario names and also descriptions.

• What characters are allowed in variables, units, descriptions etc.? Any rules? Any regular expression that must be matched?
• I would suggest to avoid ; and " in descriptions, as they mess with the usual format PIK uses for exchange this data. It doesn't seem to be a big deal, but useful for us (there are a few uses of " which might be just removed 1, 2, 3)
• Looking at a scenariomip csv snapshot, I wonder whether it would be preferable to avoid , in region names (not like REMIND dies it) such that the quoting of region names can be avoided, same for scenario names. I also would prefer not to have special characters in scenario names.

Might be worth thinking about it

[danielhuppmann]

Thanks for these suggestions - we have started to compile such guidelines at https://docs.ece.iiasa.ac.at/standards.html (rendered from a GitHub repo at https://github.com/iiasa/ece-docs) for lack of a better place. Feel free to open a PR there!

[danielhuppmann]

Follow-up (because I tried to implement this): Agree to make ; and " not recommended but we will need double-quotes (at least) for list-comprehension, see for example

common-definitions/definitions/region/native_regions/REMIND-MAgPIE_3.4-4.8.yml

Line 29 in cb85704

Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, "Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba",

[orichters]

If we remove it from the descriptions, variables, scenario names and units, that would be a good step forward (or actually sufficient for the code I have in mind).