MType list

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, Juan de Dios Santander Vela wrote:

> El 19/01/2009, a las 13:34, Mark Taylor escribió:
>
>>> I think that the best course of action is similar to your d) proposal: 
>>> providing a quarterly update on the MTypes list, or if that is considered 
>>> too frequent, a twice a year update based on the App sessions in IVOA 
>>> InterOps. Should we involved, perhaps, the Semantics group in the 
>>> maintenance of what it is a kind (albeit a different one) of controlled 
>>> vocabulary?
>> 
>> Juan,
>> 
>> can you comment on why you would rather see this information issued as a 
>> recommendation track document, which requires review by the rest of
>> the IVOA and the necessary delays associated with this, than as a Note
>> which requires no external review?  My opinion is that the details of
>> the messages which will be defined here will be of interest only to
>> quite a small community of application developers, rather than to the
>> Semantics WG or to IVOA members in general.  Also, there may be periods 
>> when revisions are desired frequently (out of sync with the IVOA Exec 
>> meetings required to ratify recommendations) and others when no changes are 
>> needed for some while.
>
> OK, I was not aware of the additional burden of Recommendation Track 
> documents. My view is that the MType list needs to be maintained in some kind 
> of official way. Perhaps the
> Recommendation Track is too much, but we might think of an internal, 
> AppsWG-contained, similar
> process...

that sounds OK: in practice I'd expect the internal review process to be
fairly informal, though if we found we needed more detailed procedures
we could come up with some.

The difference between Note and Recommendation track document is 
described in the IVOA Document Standards document:

    http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/DocStd/

Notes are permanently archived on the IVOA web site at

    http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/#notes

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/