Hi Pat,
thanks very much for your comments. I do agree with all of them. In my view, we are in RFC period, and we should just make sure to answer the RFC questions appearing.
I appreciate very much that you'd stand to answer for the region- related questions coming from Bob, Roy and Arnold.
I do think that we have worked a lot on this document, and that agreements have been reached and the doc can go to PR. But I am just another one, and I -in my chair role- should pledge to the community wishes.
I would like to make a special call here to Francois comments. It sounds bizarre that a member of the TEG raises issues now after the ADQL doc has been in the TEG for so long, and has passed the four weeks in pre-RFC within the VOQL group without nearly any comment. From my chair point of view, I should think that we should just answer the questions from Francois on the RFC pages as any other comment and will take no further action.
I would ask some of you to send me possible answers to the RFC comments, as you have a better knowledge of the details. I will then introduce them in the system and sign like, e.g., "Pat Dowler for the VOQL-TEG, agreed by Chair", or something like that. Then, we could eventually discuss them in Trieste.
Thanks for your help. It is very appreciated and really helpful.
Cheers,
P.
On 12/05/2008, at 19:52, Patrick Dowler wrote:
>
>
> On 2008-5-12 07:13, Pedro Osuna wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> there is one single session for VOQL to present the ADL document.
>>
>> I would like to more or less repeat what we did in Cambridge last
>> time, and have:
>>
>> - Inaki presenting the overall ADQL
>> - Jeff presenting the BNF and parser
>> - Pat presenting the Region
>>
>> Would you guys agree on that?
>
> Since we are in the RFC, it seems like we are inviting discussion of
> the whole
> spec. I feel it would be better to have a session where we air the
> specific
> comments made on the RFC page and answer them as well as we can.
>
>> It would also be nice to hear from you on a previous mail I sent
>> regarding the collection of inputs for the RFC from the different
>> communities, as that should also be reported in Trieste.
>
> The comments so far are from bob (as NVO?), Roy (as TCG chair?), and
> Francois
> (who is already on the TEG).
>
> Aside from some lesser issues, the comments from both Bob and Roy
> (and Arnold
> on the list) are about how we did or did not use STC. That is a
> reasonable
> question for the TCG chair to ask and we have a well-reasoned answer
> for it.
> I would be willing to stand up and lead this discussion, but I
> really don't
> think we should present, just be ready to answer.
>
> --
> The question(s) from Francois are things we discusses at length
> within the TEG
> and we already agreed to comprimise on the functional representation
> (instead
> of operator syntax). I should know, I was one of the ones wanting
> operators
> and agreeing to the comprimise :-) I don't see the point of bringing
> this out
> again as it indirectly brings a bunch of other things onto the table.
> Specifically, if we go with functions, people can implement it
> inside the DB
> and we can (must) exclude anything that does not fit existing SQL
> syntax. If
> we go with operators, people must have an ADQL parser and once we
> admit/accept that position we are open to adding anything that does
> not fit
> standard SQL syntax.
>
> --
> On Francois' other issue with a spherical distance function taking
> simple
> numeric arguments, everyone will recall that in Cambridge we
> presented region
> without a point type and just numeric arguments. The one strong
> message that
> came out of that meeting was to have the point type (just as we now
> have it).
> If an existing DB has numeric columns, it means the query has some
> extra
> stuff to clarify, for example
>
> DISTANCE ( POINT( a.coordsys, a.x, a.y), POINT( b.coordsys, b.ra,
> b.dec) )
>
> and the service has to transform coordinate systems or throw an error.
>
>
> ** Side note: I think I said in the past that we could get rid of
> RECTANGLE
> completely without loss of functionality. We either need to do that or
> explicitly specify that it is a short-hand for a POLYGON (rather
> than a range
> of coord values). I would favour just removing it entirely and in
> the RFC
> response just say that we had discussed doing that but forgot to
> conclude :-)
>
> sincerely,
>
> --
>
> Patrick Dowler
> Tel/Tél: (250) 363-6914 | fax/télécopieur: (250)
> 363-0045
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