Roy,
Another way of tackling the issue of internal tables in VOTable documents vs. external binary formats has been mentioned at the Strasbourg meeting: It is to distinguish between catalog information and measurements (pixel values):
For the VO context we might assume that catalog information is always provided in XML format. Therefore, merging and filtering such data across archive boundaries should be feasible. On the other hand, measurements can only be compared across archive boundaries when an additional meta data description for the measurements is available and that's we're I'd like to latch onto some TBD industry standard ontology system that operates in the meaning domain.
As you can see this would add a number of software layers on top of the VOTable layer. This is a reason why I might appear paranoid about XML compliance. But if we loose the ability to latch onto those evolving techniques then our VO - if we have something like that in some 3 years from now - might already be hopelessly outdated compared to service providers in other areas.
Markus Received on 2002-03-30Z01:32:27