VOTable 1.4 Working Draft

[Tom Donaldson]

Dear IVOA,

We are pleased to announce that the first Working Draft for VOTable version 1.4 is ready for review at http://www.ivoa.net/documents/VOTable/20190131/ .

The driving reason for this update is to implement the recommendations of the note, "A Proposal for a TIMESYS Element in VOTable" (http://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/TimeSys/index.html ).

Since the scope of the changes is relatively narrow, we are hoping that this review process can move quickly, ideally proceeding to official Recommendation (REC) shortly after the Paris Interop meeting.  If you have an interest in this update, or will be obligated to have an interest (TCG), please review at your earliest convenience and bring comments and concerns to the Applications Working Group list (apps at ivoa.net ).

In addition to the changes driven by TIMESYS, please note the new language in section 3 attempting to clarify some subtleties regarding namespace and schema versioning (also see http://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/XMLVers/20180529/ ).  Feedback on all aspects of the document is welcome.

I will also propose a slight change in the syntax for TIMESYS (to *require* the use of "ref" in TIMESYS references), but I will leave that for a separate thread on the Apps WG list.

Regards,
Tom