VOSI 1.1 review

[Brian Major]

Hi Mark,

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Mark Taylor <M.B.Taylor at bristol.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Brian,
>
> On Tue, 5 Jul 2016, Brian Major wrote:
>
> > I've made a revision to the document to clarify the role of the detail
> > parameter based on our conversations in Stellenbosch.   Essentially, the
> > presence of the detail parameter with a value of 'min' or 'max' is a
> > suggestion to the service as to what level of table detail to provide
> (with
> > or without Column and ForeignKey elements), but the service may choose
> > whichever.  If the detail parameter is not provided, the service may
> again
> > choose whichever level of detail.  This ensures full backwards
> > compatibility with 1.0 and allows services with a lot of table metadata
> to
> > always return the minimum level of detail.
>
> thanks, this looks about right and I think it will be a helpful
> change for my TAP clients.


Good!


> I have one suggestion for the text.
> Currently it says:
>
>    The child resource must be named with the fully-qualified table
>    name and without any intervening schema name.  For example:
>
>    \begin{verbatim}
>    GET http://example.net/srv/tables/ivoa.ObsCore
>    \end{verbatim}
>
>    would return a Table document describing the ivoa.ObsCore table
>    in full detail.
>
> That is correct, but I find it slightly confusing (since in this
> example the schema name "ivoa" is present, but not in virtue of the
> schema/table hierarchy).


Okay, yes, I can see how that could be confusing.


> I would suggest instead:
>
>    The child resource must be named with the fully-qualified table name,
>    as it appears in the name child of the corresponding Table element.
>

I think we need to be more concrete (more than just the example) on how
services must name their tables.  It would be nice if clients were able to
discover individual tables intuitively (i.e., by naming convention) without
first going to the full document at /tables to find out what the service
named them.

Perhaps, instead of saying 'without database schema', we could say that a
fully qualified table name is in the format: <database>.<table-name>

Or, we could change the example to avoid confusion...


>    For example:
>
>    \begin{verbatim}
>    GET http://example.net/srv/tables/ivoa.ObsCore
>    \end{verbatim}
>
>    would return a Table document describing the ivoa.ObsCore table
>    in full detail, starting:
>
>    \begin{verbatim}
>    <vosi:table xmlns:vosi="http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOSITables/v1.0">
>      <name>ivoa.ObsCore</name>
>        <column>
>        ...
>    \end{verbatim}
>
> 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/
>


Cheers,
Brian
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