World Meteorological Organization

The centre identifier (centre-id) is used in WIS2 to uniquely identify a participating WIS2 Node. The centre-id must conform to the specifications given in the Manual on WIS, Volume II - Appendix D. WIS2 Topic Hierarchy, section 7.1.6 Centre identification.

The centre-id comprises two dash-separated tokens.

Token 1 is a Top Level Domain (TLD) defined by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

It is usually fairly easy for a Member to choose a TLD. However, for Members’ overseas territories, this may require some thought. The recommended approach depends on the governance structure of the overseas territory. For example, Réunion is a French Department; it is considered part of France, and it uses the Euro. Réunion would use the “fr” TLD. New Caledonia is a French overseas territory with a TLD of “nc” because it has a separate, devolved governance structure. The recommendation is to use “nc”. However, the decision of which TLD to use is made at the national level.

Token 2 is a descriptive name for the centre. It may contain dashes, but it may not contain other special characters.

The descriptive name should be something recognizable – not only by the WIS2 community, but also by other users. Basing the name on the web domain name is likely to ensure that centre identifiers remain unique within a particular country or territory. For example, the National Meteorological Service of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Met Office, so “metoffice” is better than “ukmo”. Using a four-letter GTS centre identifier (for example, CCCC) is not recommended because those who are unfamiliar with GTS will not understand these identifiers.

The centre identifier specification says that larger organizations operating multiple centres may wish to register separate centre-ids for each centre. This is a good practice. Keeping with the UK example, the Met Office operates a National Meteorological Centre (NMC), 9 DCPCs (for example, a Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre) and a WIS2 Global Service, so it is important to separate them. For example:

• uk-metoffice-nmc;
• uk-metoffice-vaac;
• uk-metoffice-global-cache.

It is not advisable to use a system name in the centre-id because system names may change over time. Functional designations are durable over the long term. Test WIS2 Nodes may be designated by adding “-test” to the descriptive name.

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