x-samp namespace suggestion

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, Sylvain LAFRASSE wrote:

> >    1. Is the x-samp convention a good idea?
> 
> It sounds a litlle bit conservatve to me, but should be a a good workaround to the heavy standard updating process.
> 
> >    2. Should the imminent version (1.3) of the standard include a
> >       new metadata item samp.application-identifier (or something
> >       else along similar lines, and if so what)?
> 
> Our point was twofold.
> The straight forward one is that samp.application.name should be MANDATORY.

A mandatory metadata item does not make much sense, since clients
are not obliged to declare metadata at all.  Of the existing metadata
items, none is mandatory, but samp.name is "strongly RECOMMENDED",
and as far as I know nearly all clients provide it.  If your tool
has a requirement for one or more particular metadata items, it seems
reasonable that it just won't work for clients which don't
provide them.

> Then, our projects would need a keyword to point to a download page for any application (preferably a JNLP URL ;). The definite solution would of course be having a universal app identifier that points to a registry entry with all the application details !

Given that we go ahead with the x-samp business, you could suggest
one or more metadata keys and the SAMP community could experiment
with adopting them.  If they look like they are useful, we can
make them official in a future version of the standard.
I've added a new wiki page 
http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SampXSamp
for listing/discussing such things.

Mark

--
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/