[Radioig] Radio IG / DM WG running meeting : ObsCore extension

[alberto micol]

Dear All,

Sorry, I hope I sound more propositive than patronising… I really believe in what I’m going to say...

When we prepared ObsCore 1.0, we were driven by a consolidated and approved list of scientific use cases (*). Those use cases were provided in form of ADQL-like queries that astronomers wanted to perform to find data useful to their scientific projects. Those queries are reported in the ObsCore standard (Appendix A: Use Cases in detail).

Such list of use cases helped us a lot in cutting short discussions that otherwise would have been much longer and tiring, and likely ineffective.
Of the many parameters useful to describe any given dataset, we were forced by the collected list of use cases/database queries, to restrict ourselves to the juice of things. So to say, ObsCore is only the orange juice, it is not the orange, nor the oranges.  
The list of queries not only provided the list of most important parameters needed, but also made clear how those parameters were going to be used, hence implicitly providing their definition.

I cannot express strong enough how fundamental it was to have those use cases at hand. 
In my opinion, to be faithful to the original and commended ObsCore’s approach, I think that any extension to ObsCore 
shall provide, first of all, a list of use cases, expressed as ADQL-like queries, for the specific type of data at hand, and not yet supported by ObsCore.
(Some such use cases could even be found within the mentioned Appendix, as we could not accomodate in v1.0 all received use cases).

While reading the twiki discussion page and after having had a look at the current WD for the extension to radio data, I failed to find any reference to the queries such ObsCore extension should permit. 

Is it too late to ask, probably the Standing Committee for Science Priorities, such list of queries? 
(Of course, unless such list already exists, and I have miserably failed to find it, in which case please accept my apologies)

I believe that by looking at the new use cases, and comparing them with the existing ones, we can come up with a powerful and versatile standard.

Without new use cases, I really do not know how the questions posed in the discussion page could effectively be answered, as I do not understand what is really important, which parameters are going to be used the most by the community, which ones instead are only covering niche cases, etc. 

The ObsCore motto was: “good enough”, as opposed to “describing all possible scenarios”, I will not forget that lesson, which I hope is also passed along to the new generation of VO developers.

My two cents,
Alberto
(*) The use cases were collected by the Use Case Group of astronomers, appointed by the IVOA Take-Up Committee (predecessor of the current Standing Committee on Science Priorities), and led by David Schade, whose role did not stop there as he then organised and attended all the following ObsCore Tiger Team meetings, motivating us all, until publication of ObsCore v1.0, back in 2011. [Reference: Report of IVOA Take-Up Committee <https://wiki.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaExecMeetingFM34/IVOATake-UpRept0909.doc>, IVOA Interop, Strasbourg May 2009]


> On 26 Jul 2023, at 15:39, BONNAREL FRANCOIS <francois.bonnarel at astro.unistra.fr> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
>   We plan to have a joint on line meeting in one month in order to solve most of the remaining issues for the ObsCore extension for radio data specification
> 
>   A poll to choose date and time below. Everybody in these lists is welcomed but must of all the specification authors.
> 
> https://evento.renater.fr/survey/radio-ig-dm-wg-running-meeting-l6i1fdo0
> 
>    I remind you the links for the specification WD : https://ivoa.net/documents/ObsCoreExtensionForRadioData/20230512/index.html
> 
> the discussion page on the ivoa twiki : https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ObsCoreExtensionForRadioData
> 
> or the github project : https://github.com/ivoa-std/ObsCoreExtensionForRadioData
> 
> Cheers
> 
> François Bonnarel (RIG Chair) with
> 
> Mark Cresitello Dittmar (DMWG Chair)
> 
> Mark Kettenis (RIG vice-chair)
> 
> Mathieu Servillat (DMWG vice-chair)
> 

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