Re: String representations of numeric values

From: Mark Taylor <m.b.taylor-at-bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 20:05:10 +0100 (BST)

Tom,

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Thomas McGlynn wrote:

> > Well, the USNO-B1 service from Flagstaff adds another twist and writes the
> > RA/DEC as a 3x1 array of doubles (e.g. "12 34 56.7") and not with the
> > traditional
> > colon-delimiters. I can't find another example quickly just now, but
> > I know I've
> > seen sexigesimal in other data sets. Note the registry validation
> > level is 2 and
> > the ConeSearch validator only issues a warning that the 'units' should
> > be in degrees
> > (they're listed as 'hh mm ss", is/would that be different than "hh:mm:ss"?).
> >
>
> The validator doesn't check the format of the numbers, but I
> don't think this should be considered a valid VOTable.

I don't think you can call it invalid, though I admit it's a pain in the neck to make sense of.

> It does point out a serious error/omission in the VOTable definition though,
> in Section 7. For the normal <TABLEDATA> representations that are almost

I think you're looking at an out of date version of the standard. Most of your questions are answered in section 6 of VOTable 1.1:

   http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/REC/VOTable/VOTable-20040811.html

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
Received on 2006-04-20Z21:05:44