New working draft for VOTable 1.5 (20 November 2023)

[Tom Donaldson]

Dear Applications Working Group,

I'm pleased to announce that VOTable 1.5  working draft 20 November 2023 has been published to https://www.ivoa.net/documents/VOTable/20231120/. Since our discussion at the IVOA interop on November 11 (https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpNov2023Apps) the document has one change implemented by Mark Taylor to " Clarify and correct Units section for VOUnits" (pull request https://github.com/ivoa-std/VOTable/pull/51).

Based on the limited discussion at the interop and in the pull request mentioned above, I think we are at or near consensus that this document is ready to be moved to RFC.  Now would be a great time to have a look at this working draft and either raise any new concerns or express support for moving to RFC.  

Stilts/Topcat has been updated to both parse and validate VOTables described in this draft, and I expect to implement the same in Astropy soon.

For the remaining github issues marked for milestone v1.5, I have changed the milestone to v1.6 in the assumption that we are done addressing these issues for now.  Based on comments in Mark's recent PR that appendix A has some inconsistencies, I've filed a new issue for v1.6, "Review Appendix A, 'Possible VOTable extensions'" (https://github.com/ivoa-std/VOTable/issues/53).

Thanks for your help throughout this process.

Regards,
Tom