ranges

[Alberto Micol]

Since VO is imagination, let me be imaginative (I just had a beer for lunch:-)

Let me resurrect the idea of histograms instead of ranges.

Providing access to an histogram might give more precise results
and even provide the likelihood of success for a given query.

After all a range is just the simplest of all histograms (1 inside the range, 0 outside).
It could work for all kind of quantities, wavelengths (1d histo), sky coverage (2d histo), etc.

The implementation is VERY simple, and provides more flexibility.

Example 1:  Wavelengths

 if my dataset (e.g.) offers U and J bands I will have an histogram with 2 non-null bins.

Example 2: Wavelength + resolution

 One could offer a  lookup table for a combination
of wavelengths and wavelength resolutions: a bidimensional
histogram would do the job in a simple way.

Plus, as said, the query coiuld return the probability of success.

Alberto