SIAP and encoding of POS input parameter

[Mark Taylor]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Alberto Micol wrote:

> Interesting Mark, very useful.
>
> What if a SSAP returned VOtable is passed through SAMP to an application
> that will use those numbers to compose a TAP ADQL query to some other 
> archive?
> Will all these components have to re-parse and re-translate the numbers to 
> comply
> to the different standards?

Yes they will.  I don't think this is surprising or problematic though.
In the scenario that you outline I would expect to make use of a
VOTable parsing library which understands the VOTable standard
properly and turns numeric content into some internal representation,
and then take this internal representation and reformat it
for inclusion in generated ADQL - I wouldn't expect to snip bits of text 
representing numeric data out of one format and present it unchanged 
for use with some other standard.

If all the different standards used the same representations it would
make things tidier and make life a bit easier for implementors 
by presenting more opportunities for code re-use.  However I don't 
think it would have a major effect on interoperability.

-- 
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/