Error column in VOResource

[Patricio F. Ortiz]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Tony Linde wrote:
> > An important question is, do you see "ErrorColumn" being
> > useful for choosing/locating a resource?  (as opposed to
> > querying the table itself.)
>
> Can we really say of any metadata that no-one will want to use that piece of
> structure of metadata to locate the resource? I suspect not. VOResource
> should include all metadata as part of its specification and a registry must
> be able to return all the metadata within the VOResource structure but any
> particular instance of a registry may be implemented so that it caches all
> such metadata or not - that is an implementation decision - but the registry
> is the interface whereby all the metadata is returned - an application
> should not have to have the responsibility of querying resources for their
> metadata - the registry is a one stop shop for all metadata.

Hmmm, I missed this one. The sole existence of an ErrorColumn may be of
interest, as some resources may list the quantities without quoting any
observational error, and I can imagine a number of cases in which an
astronmer would like to have both elements (value + error), ergo,
selecting those resources where both appear; so as Tony said, we should
not disregard this case as not trivial.

Patricio
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Patricio F. Ortiz			pfo at star.le.ac.uk
AstroGrid project
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Leicester			Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2015
LE1 7RH, UK