On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, martin hill wrote:
> 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 and put future effort into producing suitable
> solutions, not in overloading VOTable to represent all data formats. FITS files
> too have limited structures.
I don't see it as a temporary measure. VOTable is not supposed to represent all data formats, FITS is a special case. From sec 2.3 of the VOTable document:
"the transformation of FITS to VOTable is meant to be reversible"
The kind of data (though not metadata) which can be held in a VOTable is by design compatible with the FITS binary table format, so that requiring the possible storage of VOTable bulk data using a FITS binary table does not introduce any additional limitations (put another way, VOTable explicitly accepts the limitations of FITS binary tables as far as pure data storage streams go).
Mark
-- Mark Taylor Starlink Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/Received on 2004-04-14Z14:41:14