Fwd: MIVOT: fully qualified attribute names

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear François,

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 05:18:27PM +0100, BONNAREL FRANCOIS wrote:
> > These are a bit hairy to find at this point. Admittedly, they *are*
> > on https://ivoa.net/xml/, but they're intermingled with all kinds of
> > XSDs, and it's really hard to see what's ancient and (excuse me)
> > stillborn and what's fresh and current. My suggestion would be: Have an
> > extra section for VO-DML files in the Schema repo so they are not
> > drowned in the legacy of more or less rusty XSD from the DM group.
> > And perhaps use a slightly different table pattern so there are links
> > to both the .vo-dml.xml and the generated HTML documentation.
>
> Yes this has been pointed out in the TCG a couple of years ago. But no
> decision was taken.
>
> Anyway Vo-dml.xml are not xsd schema. they are xml DOCUMENTS, following the
> vodml xsd schema.
>
> vo-dml xml documents could be attachedd to the fron page of each data model
> specification.

I'm fine with either having a section in XSD or a separate page, but
in needs to be tackled before we can expect anyone to take up MIVOT.
Who will?

> > I can't *promise* that would have prevented me from having asked for
> > a clarification, but I'd claim there's a good chance.
> Yes dm-roles are the vodml-id of classes and attributes. It's unambiguous

Well, in the current document it arguably is not.  Let's put in a
sentence or two; I've made a suggestion somewhere up in this thread
that I could turn into a PR if you want.

> We have plenty of working examples for that.

Hm... I'd find these a lot more convincing if there were the DM
annotation validator.  At least in some of the ones I looked at, I
found inconsistencies, and as I said: my Registry experience tells me
that it's unlikely they actually match the specs as long as there's
no computer checking them.

> We have to break the deadlock loop.

Sure -- but that doesn't hinge on the status of MIVOT.  Folks don't
start implementing things when something is REC (we have several
examples for that), they start implementing when there's a clear
picture of what to do, and ideally when it lets them do something
they couldn't do before.

We can (and indeed should) provide for both while MIVOT is still in
PR and fixes are relatively easy and cheap.

> Photometry at least can strongly benefit from MIVOT

I'll happily provide MIVOT annotation to my photometry columns if
someone shows me how to do it (use Gaia's mean phot_* columns as an
example; I think I can work from that).  I have to admit that I got
somewhat lost and confused when I tried that, but that may just be a
tooling/documentation problem (see above).

          -- Markus