> Tony said at the beginning of this discussion, VOTable is
> primarily a way of holding metadata. It happens to also be
Definitely not. VOTable is a (one, current) way of holding small amounts of tabular data and I don't think it is a very good way to do even that. It is a dreadful way of representing metadata for all the reasons stated by Alasdair, Martin and others.
> convenient for moving results because a lot (should be all?)
> of VOTools 'speak' VOTable.
The few tools written do speak VOTable, but mostly different dialects - inventing an 'own' metadata format makes such diversity of implementing so-called standards inevitable, I'm afraid.
Cheers,
Tony.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-votable-at-eso.org [mailto:owner-votable-at-eso.org] On
> Behalf Of Anita Richards
> Sent: 14 April 2004 14:26
> To: martin hill
> Cc: votable-at-ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: Comments on V1.1 - Future of VOTable (flame bait sigh)
>
> >
> > I agree with everything you say Anita except this bit!
> VOTable is not
> > the right thing to *start* with when looking at the next
> stage. Let's
> > use XML as it was meant to be used, not take XML, apply a
> schema, then
> > try and squeeze everything into the resulting IVO-specific format.
>
> Are we talking about using VOTable to hold the SED or the
> metadata? And for whom?
>
> Maybe I ahve got the wrong end of the stick, but as I think
> Tony said at the beginning of this discussion, VOTable is
> primarily a way of holding metadata. It happens to also be
> convenient for moving results because a lot (should be all?)
> of VOTools 'speak' VOTable.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> - Dr. Anita M. S. Richards, AVO Astronomer MERLIN/VLBI
> National Facility, University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank
> Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL, U.K.
> tel +44 (0)1477 572683 (direct); 571321 (switchboard); 571618 (fax).
>
Received on 2004-04-14Z15:49:31