Re: Comments on V1.1 - Future of VOTable (flame bait sigh)

From: Alasdair Allan <aa-at-astro.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 13:21:43 +0100 (BST)

> While I appreciate that VOTable can be used to wrap FITS, this is (I
> hope) a temporary measure while we sort out our data models and
> representations. We should recognise it as such...

I'm not sure about this, "wrapping" a FITS fits by providing a URI to a binary file and providing the meta-data in the VOTable XML is a reasonable thing to want to do. Lots of times you don't actually want the data at all, just the meta-data.

> ...and put future effort into producing suitable solutions, not in
> overloading VOTable to represent all data formats.

I definately agree with this, I think overloading VOTable so that it supports SED, spectra and time series would be a serious mistake.

> FITS files too have limited structures.

Agreed!

Al.

-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter
Received on 2004-04-14Z14:22:21