Error column in VOResource

[Clive Page]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Tony Linde wrote:

> As an example of just how badly VOTable represents metadata, check out
> Francois' example of representing GOODS metadata in VOTable:
>   http://www.ivoa.net/forum/dal/0029.htm

OK, I see the problem, just don't see any obvious alternative.

If you attach all the metadata to every field element, it expands from
just a few characters "<td> </td>" to a hundred or more.  I grant you that
the telecoms companies need our money if they are to avoid more
bankruptcies, but we've already expanded a typical table by a factor of 10
in moving from FITS/binary to VOTable/TABLEDATA, and another factor of 10
or more seems to me to be over-generous to them.

If you rearrange the data by columns, so that you have one copy of the
metadata and then a list of vector elements after it, that is much more
compact, but requires the data in a typical DBMS or FITS table to be
transposed, which is a memory-intensive and cpu-intensive step.

Or maybe there's some other way that I missed...


-- 
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.