TAP1.0 Comments

[Patrick Dowler]

On Monday 13 July 2009 09:34:30 Francois Ochsenbein wrote:
> 2.5: again I share Mark's remarks concerning
>      * (no arraysize of xtype): what does it mean ?
>      * the inconsistency with VOTable (the PR VOtable1.2 document
>        specifies "iso8601" and "STC-S" as agreed at the last IVOA
>        meeting). At this meeting, did we mention between POINT
>        and REGION as 2 different datatypes ?
>     In the table, the column 'arraysize' should contain 'n*' for
>     VARCHAR(n) and VARBINARY(n) in order to be consistent with VOTable;
>     for types BLOB, CLOB, STC-S, the column 'arraysize' should contain
>     an asterisk (*). For TIMESTAMP, the column 'arraysize' should also
>     contain a value (either *, or a value like 10 for a date or 19
>     for timestamp accurate to 1s)

I previously responded (http://www.ivoa.net/forum/dal/0907/1389.htm) when Mark 
brought this up. Essentially, one needs to differentiate between point and 
region for uploaded tables because columns of these types are not all usable 
in the same places (eg. as arguments to the same ADQL functions). 

More generally, it was also agreed in the discussions that xtype was to mean 
an external datatype, not a format. STC-S is not a datatype. Although iso8601 
is also not a datatype (it is a format) it also implies, at least in the 
context of TAP, that one probably means TIMESTAMP.

-- 

Patrick Dowler
Tel/Tél: (250) 363-0044
Canadian Astronomy Data Centre
National Research Council Canada
5071 West Saanich Road
Victoria, BC V9E 2M7

Centre canadien de donnees astronomiques
Conseil national de recherches Canada
5071, chemin West Saanich
Victoria (C.-B.) V9E 2M7