StandardsRegExt: links to schemas

[Mark Taylor]

(I've narrowed the distribution again since this concerns the details
of the proposal rather than the procedure)

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Ray Plante wrote:

> > If the main use case is, as you say, human discovery of the schemas,
> > it doesn't seem to add all that much benefit, since for a human making
> > use of such a registry record, the cost of the additional step of
> > indirecting via the human-readable standard document itself is likely
> > to be low compared with whatever use is being made of it
> > (e.g. trying to understand what it means and how to use it).
> 
> This is a reasonable argument.  I might offer that a human that
> encounters a rendering of the record such as this one:
> 
> http://vao.stsci.edu/directory/getRecord.aspx?id=ivo://org.gavo.dc/misc/tapexamples
> 
> (which doesn't actually define a schema; that is, an autogenerated, 
> human-readable rendering of the record) and perhaps who is not
> completely ignorant of the context of the standard might appreciate
> seeing a link to the schema file and associated examples.  

I'm a bit confused then (quite common when I'm discussing topics
with the word "schema" in).  What schema(s) would be referenced
in a registry record like this?  As you say this standard doesn't 
define a schema.  The examples are very useful, but given that, they
should be (and in this case are) in the human-readable standard 
document, or at least linked from it.
Further, it's much easier to give context to the examples if they
are approached from the human-readable document than simply referenced
from a registry record.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/