Re: Followup / proposed action

Dear Kona and rest of the crew,

certainly, we must take into account the already existing standards and make use of them. No question about that.

Aurelien (who is in _very close_ contact with Ray Plante on Registry issues) is working with the ESAVO team represented by Inaki in the VOQLTEG  (as Jeff is doing for Kona in ADQL for instance, and others might be doing the same...). So he is making sure that we do not deviate from already existing structures with respect to Registry work.

We also have Alex in this group, who is the NVO representative and can get inputs for this group from any of his NVO members, in particular from Ray.

Also, you Kona have access to Kevin, another crucial person in the Registry work, and I think it is obvious that getting information from him would be very useful.

The VOQL-TEG group members can, and I think must, get as many inputs as they can from their communities. The reason to have a small group is to be more efficient in the collecting of inputs that might otherwise get spread. It does not mean that inputs to the VOQL-TEG have to come only from the opinion of their individual members (not at all!!!).

I have no problem at all in asking the Registry officially on this, but I would still rather prefer that Alex does it as part of his normal belonging to our group, and that he gives a recommendation on how to deal with this type of data coming from Ray as one of his community (NVO) members.

I think it is important that we all remember that any eventual TAP will have to be agreed by _all the IVOA community_ using the normal process of documentation and interactions in interop meetings, etc. However, we agreed that someone has to start it, and it was agreed (and reported to and agreed by the Exec) that this group would do it, and this is what we are doing.

We should not try to have everything done, but just produce a very first draft that we can present for discussion in China interop. Remember that this has been agreed in the past in several occasions and has been reported to and agreed by the Exec (to whom I, as all other WG chairs, report regularly).

Remember also that all activities of this group are public in the IVOA pages, and that a regular (up to now only once) feedback is given to the whole VOQL community.

Therefor I propose to get inputs from Ray or Aurelien or Kevin as we are currently doing, i.e., through the corresponding VOQL-TEG representative, and leave the door open to asking further during the interop in China.

Please let me know whether this approach sounds reasonable to you or not. Otherwise, I have no problem in asking the Registry chairman officially myself to get his collective view on this.

Thanks,
Cheers,
P.  

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 11:40 +0000, Kona Andrews wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> A quick followup to yesterday's telecon, with a proposed action
> on my part.
>
> When I mentioned yesterday that we already have working tooling to use
> VOResource-style tabular metadata descriptions for guiding assisted
> query-builder tools, it was suggested that we were trying to drive the
> TAP standard based on a particular client implementation.
>
> On the contrary, I raised the example to show that there already
> exists a *useful* IVOA VOResource format for describing tabular metadata,
> that is mature enough to have been integrated into real systems.
>
> Speaking as a software engineer, I believe that the default condition
> would be for TAP to use the existing IVOA standard for expressing tabular
> metadata - there is no special justification required for doing this.
> On the other hand, for us to justify defining a new and competing standard,
> there would need to be a compelling argument as to why the existing
> standard is both currently inadequate, and not capable of being made
> adequate, for our purposes.
>
> In order to anchor this debate to reality, I propose (unless anyone
> objects) to seek some advice from the registry group. I propose to ask
> their opinion as to the most appropriate existing VOReource tabular
> metadata description schema or schema fragment that we might use (together
> with any proposed developments to it).
>
> Once we have this suggestion, we can then objectively consider whether
> this description format meets our requirements - and if it doesn't, our
> first course of action should be to consult the registry group and see
> whether an improved version can be produced. If this process fails to
> produce a usable standard, then of course we would be justified in
> defining a new one - but we haven't even begun the process yet.
>
> Cheers,
> Kona
>
> "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
> choose from."
> -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

-- 
Pedro Osuna Alcalaya

European Space Agency (ESA)
European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)
Research and Scientific Support Department (RSSD)
Astronomy Science Operations Division (SCI-SD)
e-mail: Pedro.Osuna-at-esa.int
Tel + 34 91 813 13 14    Fax: +34 91 813 11 72
-------------------------------------------------                                                                                
European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)
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E-28080 Villafranca del Castillo
MADRID - SPAIN

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