IVOA Errata, Identifiers for Obscore

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Dear lists,
> 
> The important stuff is below.  First, very briefly:
> 
> On Fri, Dec 06, 2013 at 01:54:07PM +0000, Mark Taylor wrote:
> > On Wed, 4 Dec 2013, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> > > And here the trouble starts.  First, I messed up.  For some reason I
> > > cannot find, a bad identifier sneaked into the example in the
> > > TAPRegExt draft; it lists ivo://ivoa.net/std/obscore-1.0 as the
> > 
> > From the department of the super-picky: as far as I can see, 
> > TAPRegExt says "ivo://ivoa.net/std/ObsCore-1.0"
> > (different capitalisation).  Since they are both wrong it obviously
> 
> This actually would need to be cross-posted to ReR, but IMHO it's a
> minor thing -- IOVA Identifiers say:
> 
>   Identifiers are considered case-insensitive; however, the preferred
>   rendering of character case in the ID is determined when its resource
>   is registered.
> 
> This is one of these short sentences in specs that in my experience
> cause no end of grief, but it's there, and we won't get rid of it.
> 
> My personal way of coping is ignore the stuff about "preferred" and
> just have them all lower case whenever I can.  It's still a mess, but
> IMHO a smaller one.

I hadn't realised that, thanks for pointing it out.
However, that is potentially really nasty.  My RI1.0 Search queries
for (e.g.) TAP services look like this:

   capability/@standardID = 'ivo://ivoa.net/std/TAP'

(that's ADQL/S - supply a stamped addressed envelope for the same thing
in ADQL/X).  Given the lack of case-sensitivity guarantees for string
comparison in ADQL (I think?) that means it's anyone's guess whether
this is going to return all the relevant services.

One more reason to be glad that RI2 is on its way I suppose.

--
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/