Standardising units and formats (and ref frames?) in transmission

[Jesus Salgado]

Dear Petr,

I see your point in this very particular point and, as we talked in the
past, I propose you to transmit us your feedback and the one you obtain
from the community. In my view, to propagate the information between VO
developers and VO scientists in a bidirectional way is the best
approach to improve the whole IVOA project.

As I asked you in the past, a good input would be if you send us some
science cases where you can identify what can done and what can´t with
our application, in particular using the algorithms we developed
following your suggestions.

See you in Strasbourg,
Jesus

Quoting Petr Skoda <skoda at sunstel.asu.cas.cz>:

>
> I did not want to start this off-topic, but it may be the conceptual
> misunderstanding which confirms my previous post (sorry I should have
> been more specific to explain what is wrong from my point of view).
>
> It is probably the example of conflicts between the VO developer (who
> tries to make the tool interoperable, elegant, consistent ....) and
> the ordinary astronomer, who is usually the expert in his field but
> is not a IT geek and should be considered strongly conservative (and
> hardly ever wants to read manuals ;-)
>
>  If the tool does not fit his expectations (and conceptual model of
> his thinking ) he has a strong tendency to disregard it however
> productive, efficient etc it is just due to (from our point of view)
> the subtle and weird reasons ..
>
> Its a experience I have made during my career with many stellar
> astronomers (from all over the world - usually they came from small
> observatories, university departments etc .... ) trying to convince
> them to use the  VO for their research, giving lectures and showing
> them the power of VO tools.
>
> E.g. when I convinced one of this collegue to try both VOSpec and
> SPLAT, he had after 10 minutes of trial preferred SPLAT (just after
> trying to get spectrum of his favourite star from archives he had
> known it must be there). The reason was as I stated in last mail.
>
> He wrote the coordinates in both tools, got some numbers and queried
> archives. The result was that SPLAT has found the observations, the
> VOSpec not. So next trial was Vega (looking in some table of his
> targets and calibration objects he wrote directly coordinates).
>
> It was even worse- the Elodie archive returned something strange -
> some very cold star.
>
> The result was -  "it seems not to work - perhaps it needs still some
> tuning !!"
>
> The SPLAT returned what he wanted immediately.
>
>> Petr wrote:
>>> The VOspec allows only degrees but if you enter the H:M:S representation
>>> it makes strange numbers and performs the query of strange coordinates
>>> (no complain).
>
> Again - I do not have any  complaints
>  about functionality of VOSpec - it is strictly designed as VO  tool
> and requires the kind of VO habits (if you stay longer at the input
> field it writes hint:
> "Right Ascention  in degrees" - its OK but who will bother to convert
> just to see something working ;-)
>
>> the strange coordinates you mention are in degrees, my friend!
> That is the point !! 99% people will expect this to be  DECIMAL HOURS !!!!
> (despite the long periodic number that usually fills the input field
> after conversion - which prevents to see the beginning of the number-
> he can check the param tree and see tre POS )
>
>  > VOSpec admits the following string coordinates formats for RA: >
>> DD:MM:SS.SSS
>> 18:36:56.336 is 18degrees, 36 minutes, 56.336 seconds (degrees are the
>> default)
> Nice but its not RA of Vega !
>
>
>>
>> DDh:MM:SS.SSS
>> 18h:36:56.336 is 18hours, 36 minutes, 56.336 seconds,
>> (transformed to 271.538933333333 degrees by VOSpec)
>
> This is OK - but you have to be very clever to find the trick (and
> read manual ;-) Perhaps the habit from IRAF (people are lazy to add
> additional h)
>
> Its about the expectations, habits etc ... !
>
>> This is described in the VOSpec help pages
>
> As I said - everything is fine - but VO will have success only if it
> will be natural to use the VO tools as legacy tools (biased by the
> environment and community optical say  X-ray,  radio, optical )
>
>
> I would not stay with this issue longer - its a problem for me to
> stay independent enough ;-) at the boundary between the VO developers
> and (conservative) users - I understand both sides but its difficult
> to explain to the other group the reasons why something is such and
> not as they expect......
>
> Perhaps we can postpone this discussion to some nice pub in Strasbourg ;-)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Petr Skoda
>
> *************************************************************************
> *  Petr Skoda                         Phone : +420-323-649201, ext.
> 361 * *  Stellar Department                         +420-323-620361
>         *
> *  Astronomical Institute AS CR       Fax   : +420-323-620250           *
> *  251 65 Ondrejov                    e-mail: skoda at sunstel.asu.cas.cz  *
> *  Czech Republic                                                       *
> *************************************************************************
>
>
>
>



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