Writing this question is my action from the NVO TechWG phone call this
week.
There was a long discussion of VOTable and its use in SOAP services and other sophisticated XML applications. The complaint is that some XML tools do not work properly with the VOTable schema because the SCHEMA IS RECURSIVE. People mentioned Axis version 1.3 wsdl2java, and some code-binding tools. The recursion is in two places: (a) RESOURCE containing RESOURCE elements and (b) OPTION containing OPTION elements. The VOTable schema is legal. But the tools clearly do not work with all legal schema. We thought back in 2002 that the tools would "catch up" and the problem would evaporate. But now it is four years later. Is it time for a pragmatic simplification?
QUESTION for this group:
Is it desirable to build an official standard "VOTableLight" schema
which does not have recursion, yet validates most instances of VOTable?
-- The simplified structure would have RESOURCE contains TABLEs, rather
than RESOURCE contains TABLEs and RESOURCEs.
-- It could handle a list of tables, but not a tree of tables.
Roy
California Institute of Technology
626 395 3670
Received on 2006-04-21Z21:59:30