On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Kona Andrews wrote:
> 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.
Speaking of standards to consider in this area, we also have VOTable, which is the primary IVOA standard for conveying tabular data of any kind (especially useful for cases where such data may be consumed by scientific applications, where many standard tools are already available), and SQL92, which defines a general and widely implemented standard for describing tables. It would be good to look also at the latter, to see what kind of metadata has been defined.