x-samp namespace suggestion

[Laurent Bourgès]

Dear all,

few comments below:

2011/9/27 Mark Taylor <m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk>:
> 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.

Agreed. I propose also to have one wiki page giving the complete list
of application meta data keywords used among all SAMP applications
worldwide. I am convinced that such keywords are subject to change
that's why it can become boring / difficult to maintain the SAMP
standard document every time a new keyword is needed. What do you
think to externalize this part of the specification (section 3.6) into
one wiki page that will act as one official extension of the SAMP
standard ?

>>
>> >    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.

As you said: "as far as I know nearly all clients provide it", I
propose to modify the standard to make application meta data MANDATORY
with at least (samp.application.name and
x-samp.application.identifier) and one new recommended keyword
x-samp.application.link that points to an URI describing the
application (home page for example).

>
>> 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 !

We also need - as sylvain said - the JNLP (Java web start application)
URL; I propose the keyword x-samp.application.link.jnlp

>
> 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.

Great; maybe someone (mark ? us at jmmc) should gather all known
non-standard keywords into such wiki pages to propose new xsamp
keywords ...

I mean topcat, aladin and our applications already use non-standard
keywords curation (affiliation, author, email), description (home
page, documentation / support web pages ...) and one very important:
application.version (public, beta, 0.9.0 ...)

Best regards,
Laurent