Dear IVOA theory members,
First, I am happy that this mailing list is active with many contributions
recently.
Besides, the simulation data model changed a lot thanks to Gerard and
other contributors in a good way I think.
Since last InterOp (end of september), the public documents about SNAP DM
& protocol did not change at all,
so I tried to use them & implement the SNAP DM for french simulations
(galmer, horizon halo & galaxy catalogs, PDR...) and this work is still
going on.
I want now to insist on one main point : SNAP documentation & change logs.
Gerard changed SNAP pages to provide a new UML model, updated XML schemas and a new online documentation appeared : great !
However, does it imply that the previous reference document (SNAP_SimulationDM.doc) will not be updated anymore ?
My concrete problem is to find differences between previous and current versions of the SNAP DM.
I purpose to use UML for what it is efficient = modelling.
I mean the reference document for SNAP DM should be the UML model (edited with the community edition of Magic Draw UML) and provided as a single xml file : SNAP Simulation DM.xml.
I think that xml schemas & online documentation should be generated from this xml document mainly by XSLT transformations or any other solution (maybe, ask help to DAL group) because it would be more accurate & easy to maintain.
For now, the problem is that the UML project does not contain following
information :
- short & long description of every entity (SNAPProtocol, SNAPExperiment ...)
So it is difficult to get descriptions and details of SNAP entities &
attributes,
because the information is spread out in UML document & xml schemas.
Besides, it is hard to maintain manually those documents I think, that's why I purpose to use the UML model as the 'Reference' document with as much information as possible.
Finally, a change log is needed to provide details on DM evolutions as
Gerard begun to do it.
Maybe, it could be generated too by a difference analysis tool...
Laurent