TAP VOSI Information

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Gretchen Greene wrote:

> Following up on this thread...
> 
> we are indeed using SQL Server databases to store varbinary,  
> blobs, e.g. higher performance systems with varying compressed 
> jpg images,  or complex footprint regions.  So for these 
> instances,  it's not clear to me how this content is currently 
> managed in a  VOTable, i.e. what is current  'type handling' 
> for managing binary formats?  This would be lower level than 
> VOSI,  nevertheless a conceivable VOTable content limitation?

To serialize blobs into a VOTable you can put them in a column with
datatype="unsignedByte" and either a fixed or variable arraysize.
The new xtype (Extended Datatype) attribute is an appropriate place 
to record additional information about the kind of data represented
by the binary sequence (for instance that it is a jpeg).

Mark

--
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/