> I am very very wary of additional formats; this has been suggested
> be fore but
> the beauty of VOTable is precisely that it is very simple and the
> average
> astronomer in the wild can get to grips with it, whereas the full
> complexity of
> XML scares us off. More imporantly, VOTable is so widely used that
> there are
> many tools in both astronomy adn solar physics which use it. For
> example, one
> of the students here has just written a package to raid the MERLIN
> archive for
> all data on X-ray binaries, process the data with parselTongue, and
> convert the
> output to a VOTable of variability (flux density v. time at various
> frequencies)
> which can then be merged or compared with variability data from other
> observatories. The point is, that this is not someone starting with
> the
> intention of using VO tools, it is someone who happens to find them
> more useful
> that the alternatives, since VOTables are more likely than any
> other format to
> be produced by the other data providers and recognised by the tools
> he wants to
> use... so he is surely not the only one.
>
> So, I would argue that any format in which data are published
> should be
> intelligible to tools which handle VOTables, without any special
> extra tools,
> and that all the essential metadata defined in IVOA standards is
> preserved in
> the VOTables.
I'm no big fan of VOTable, but in this case, I have to agree: a VOTable can easily do the same thing as <NapkinLightcurve> but is already standardized and there are already parsers and tools. The only complaint can be that VOTable isn't just for lightcurves so one has to check for the ucd's - so what, you'll have to do that anyway.
Rick
Dr. Frederic V. Hessman Hessman-at-Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE Institut für Astrophysik Tel. +49-551-39-5052 Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1 Fax +49-551-39-5043 37077 Goettingen Room F04-133http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman
http://monet.Uni-Goettingen.de ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------Received on 2007-07-05Z18:08:02