[Question] Guidance on naming for Radio Astronomy accessor

[sjperkins]

What is your issue?

Hello, the radio astronomy community is developing an xarray based data model for radio astronomy data.

• https://xradio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/measurement_set_overview.html

We're thinking about developing a community-wide accessor and were wondering if there was any guidance on what to name our accessor. The canonical xarray example on using accessors uses a geo namespace.

Is it reasonable to name the accessor after the domain. i.e. something related to radio astronomy given that we're creating a global namespace? Following on from this point, should we be mindful of collisions with other domains? For example we were considering ms and ps accessor names (which are rather short), but these might clash with other domains.

/cc @Jan-Willem @scpmw

[TomNicholas]

the radio astronomy community is developing an xarray based data model for radio astronomy data.

Cool! If you have examples of use we would love to highlight this use case in our docs / as a user story (see xarray-contrib/xarray.dev#344).

any guidance on what to name our accessor

Not really, you're free to do what you like here.

Is it reasonable to name the accessor after the domain.

An accessor is fundamentally defined by the code in one package. So I would personally pick a name that reflects the scope of your package.

these might clash with other domains.

Of course it would be better not to collide, but consider that collision is only a problem if you have both domain-specific packages installed and imported at once, which seems potentially unlikely.