Definitive version of the VOTable schema for web services

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

I don't want to get into a discussion about the perceived abilities of  
our users (or should that be abilities of our perceived users?). The  
bottom line is that there are widely-used toolkits out there to hide  
the horrors of web services that do not mesh particularly well with VO  
web services that serve VOTables. We can either have a santioned  
version of VOTable that does work with these services or provide our  
own toolkit to use with our services.

	Cheers,

	Matthew



On Jul 30, 2008, at 8:16 AM, Anita M. S. Richards wrote:

>
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Ray Plante wrote:
>
>>> astronomer
>>
>> I believe it was implicit in the discussion that by "astronomer" we  
>> meant the "scripting astronomer", one who has enough scripting  
>> ability to use, say, a Python module to access a web service.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Ray
>>
>
> That is fine for e.g. the VO expert in a large project or students  
> whose project has a major fraction working  on these sorts of data,  
> but it excludes the majority of astronomers; whereas most  
> astronomers do use VOTables although most are not aware of it.  If  
> the minority are your target audience, fine.  Regarding the list of  
> pacjkages from fortran to IDL... most astronomers will learn one or  
> two, they will _not_ learn the whole lot.  Currently, to make best  
> use of VOs, people need a bit of SQL plus _one_ scripting language  
> out of python, perl or IDL, in most cases. That is about as much as  
> we can expect.
>
>
> cheers
> a
>
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  
> - - -
>
> Dr. A.M.S. Richards, AstroGrid Astronomer,
> Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Alan Turing Building,  
> University of Manchester, M13 9PL
> +44 (0)161 275 4124
> and
> MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Cheshire  
> SK11 9DL, U.K. +44 (0)1477 571321 (tel) 571618 (fax)
>
>