Error column in VOResource

[Roy Williams]

> I wasn't saying that Martin's was any better but that we should wait for
DM
> to complete so we have a base metadata schema to work from. And that
schema
> should be based on XMLSchema not something like the VOTable TABLE/FIELD
> construct for which we have to write all new interpreters instead of
> starting from standard tools.

(1) DM is not working on any more data-structure modelling, they are working
only on semantic modelling (see architecture document section 4). I do not
see any progress on the former, so we are on our own.
http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaArchitecture/IVOarch4.htm

(2) VOTable is perfectly good XML. The problems with the XML tools arise
with their restriction to static typing that is compiled in. However VOTable
has dynamic typing -- you don't know until runtime what datatypes are in the
table.

However I will point out that if we use VOTable for the header only, then
the standard tools work well. This was always the intention: that the header
can be used independently to describe table metadata, and the data can be in
some other format.