question about concept representation/formating

[Carlos Rodrigo Blanco]

>> The point is: when an application downloads my votable, I would like to be 
>> able to tell it how the description of the concept should be displayed. 
>> Maybe the application decides to follow my advice or it doesn't,  but I 
>> think that it would be nice if the information is there so that it can be, 
>> eventually, used.
>
> Section 1.2 of the VOTable (v1.2) specification describes how one may embed 
> unparsed XML CDATA text:
>
> 	http://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_cdata.asp

Yes, that is the kind of solution I have thought of at first: including an 
additional table (or a link to it) with the relevant information in, for 
instance, html format.

I just wondered if there were some other more standard way in some data 
model, vocabulary, ontology (or whatever) fashion. And if somebody (other 
than me) is interested in it. It seems surprising that many people are 
interested in the meaning of fields, their descriptions, their relations, 
but not in how they should be displayed.

  >
> You could use this to convey almost any sort of presentation pragma (links to 
> PDFs?, uuencoded PNGs?) within the document.  There has also been a recent 
> thread in the VOTable working group on attaching formatting metadata more 
> explicitly to columns:
>
> 	http://www.ivoa.net/forum/votable/0905/date.htm
>
> but my interpretation of the discussions is that they are looking for a way 
> to express C or FORTRAN-like field specifiers, not some mathematical 
> expression language like you describe.


Yes,I understood it in the same way than you (although I only have read 
part of the conversation)

Thanks :-)

Carlos