Re: RFC for UCD is ending

From: Alberto Micol <Alberto.Micol-at-eso.org>
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:58:55 +0100

Dear Sebastein,

Two things: (a) Backus Naur form and (b) versioning/conformity.

  1. Backus Naur

I'd like to re-instantiate what I already proposed in Boston (sorry Sebastien to come back with this one):

All UCDs should terminate with a semicolon.

I'd like to see this implemented for one main reason: simplicity which can be explicit with the following two arguments:

  1. a UCD should never be a substring of another UCD (how else to formulate this concept in a Backus Naur form?)
  2. having a terminator helps when parsing or when building an SQL queries looking for a given UCD; without a terminator a more complex SQL is necessary or otherwise parsing of the result set is required.
  3. versioning/conformity

Robert Hansich wrote:

>I think the list of UCD1+ words at
>http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/UCD/ucd1p-words.txt HAS to be included in this
>document, or else we do not have a complete specification.
>

I totally agree.
Of course the UCD vocabulary must have its own versioning. In other words, the UCD vocabulary should specify its own version AND should specify which specs it conforms to (UCD1, UCD1+, UCD3, etc).

I think the machanism for versioning and conformity SHALL be described in the document.

Alberto Received on 2004-11-24Z10:59:31