IVOA VOTable signature issue

[Mark Taylor]

Marco,

On Mon, 27 Mar 2017, Marco Molinaro wrote:

> 2017-03-23 10:40 GMT+01:00 François Bonnarel
> <francois.bonnarel at astro.unistra.fr>:
> >
> > 1 ) Having the standardID of the protocol in an INFO tag of the response is
> > definitely a good idea.
> 
> Regarding this topic, Pierre lighted a discussion at last week's
> ASTERICS DADI Tech Forum.
> The general opinion was that it's a good idea indeed, and that an INFO
> element (as a <votable>
> child) could take care of this information.
> 
> Some hesitation whether this info should be <resource> related was
> expressed, but it seems
> that, for now at least something like:
> 
> <info name="STANDARD_ID" value="ivo://ivoa.net/TAP"/>
> 
> may be ok.
> 
> Now, while looking at DALI-1.1, I realized that it's already there
> (§4.4.3) and it's there since DALI-1.0.

Good catch!  And apologies that (as a listed DALI author) I didn't
realise that was in place.
 
> The changes to make would be
> - move it from a MAY clause into some more robust recommendation (not
> a MUST, of course)

Yes, I'd say it should get promoted to a SHOULD.

> - define if it should be "standardID" (as it is now in the text) or
> "STANDARD_ID",
>    as proposed by Markus following the QUERY_STATUS format

Since it's already present as "standardID" I don't think there
is a good argument to change the capitalisation.

> - consider if we have to move that <info> from being child of
> <resource> (DALI-1.1 currently)
>   to a child of <votable> directly

Not so sure about this.  I *think* it's more logical to have it as
a direct child of the VOTable document, since that's what's
coming from the service.  On the other hand, DALI 4.4 says that
anything outside of the RESOURCE labelled type="results" is outside
the scope of DALI.  At present, we don't have multi-resource VOTable
documents from any service, but one or the other option might look
more sensible if at some time in the future we do.
But on balance, I'd say leave the DALI text as it is and work with that.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/