Hi Doug,
> 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.
Could you clarify a little what you were saying yesterday in the telecon about not using SIAP-style VOTable to return tabular metadata?
As I understand it, you were suggesting that in your prospective use of VOTable for returning tabular metadata descriptions, you did *not* propose to use the ordinary VOTable header section to describe the metadata (i.e. return an "empty" votable just containing headers and no actual data rows).
Instead, you seemed to be proposing that the metadata description would be returned inside the actual table rows of the VOTable (with the VOTable header presumably conveying some other kind of information, or no information?). Is that correct, or have I misunderstood what you were saying?
If the metadata is to be conveyed in the table rows, is there a pre-existing IVOA standard for the provision of such metadata within VOTable table data rows that we can consider? Or is the standards-compliance here based on the use of a IVOA-standard VOTable wrapper to contain a custom-purpose metadata description format?
Cheers,
Kona
-- Kona Andrews kea-at-roe.ac.uk AstroGrid Project http://www.astrogrid.org IfA, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJReceived on 2007-03-09Z14:21:06