Spectral DM document update

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

Arguably, this whole discussion is moot.  If you're transporting  
enough data that XML efficiency becomes an issue, then you probably  
shouldn't be using XML -- that's not what it's for.  A Swiss army  
knife is a wonderful thing, but shouldn't be used for brain surgery.

As Doug said:

On 2006 Oct 9 , at 16.09, Doug Tody wrote:

> (None of this may matter in the end as most people will probably use
> VOTable and FITS for spectra, but nonetheless array handling in XML
> is an important issue to consider).

While I take the second point, I would still maintain that using XML  
for this sort of transport is probably an abuse of tools.

There are ways of being efficient about XML, if that's what's really  
required.  I have a paper sitting here by Peter Buneman and co at  
Edinburgh, on `Vectorizing and Querying Large {XML} Repositories',  
DOI 10.1109/ICDE.2005.150 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2005.150>.   
It describes a scheme (and points to others) for effectively  
compressing away the XML overhead, and transparently making it column- 
accessible, without actually losing the useful structuring.  Bob Mann  
is one of the authors and could probably say more about it.

If bulk data and XML structuring are both seen as vital, then  
something like this is, I would think, a more stable solution to the  
problem than the parser-inside-parser solution of having strings of  
numbers within XML.

All the best,

Norman


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Norman Gray  /  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  /  University of Leicester, UK