Since VO is imagination, let me be imaginative (I just had a beer for lunch:-)
Let me resurrect the idea of histograms instead of ranges.
Providing access to an histogram might give more precise results and even provide the likelihood of success for a given query.
After all a range is just the simplest of all histograms (1 inside the range, 0 outside). It could work for all kind of quantities, wavelengths (1d histo), sky coverage (2d histo), etc.
The implementation is VERY simple, and provides more flexibility.
Example 1: Wavelengths
if my dataset (e.g.) offers U and J bands I will have an histogram with 2 non-null bins.
Example 2: Wavelength + resolution
One could offer a lookup table for a combination of wavelengths and wavelength resolutions: a bidimensional histogram would do the job in a simple way.
Plus, as said, the query coiuld return the probability of success.
Alberto Received on 2003-05-02Z14:54:51