Voc in the VO 2 / remarks

[Mark Taylor]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, François Bonnarel wrote:

> Hi Mark,
> 
> Le 04/06/2020 à 00:48, Mark Taylor a écrit :
> > On Tue, 2 Jun 2020, François Bonnarel wrote:
> > 
> > >        2 ) for the  same reason (incomplete discussion) "Preliminary"
> > > terms
> > > should not be set in the "official" vocabulary list even with the
> > > "preliminary" tag. Examples using those terms should be provided in
> > > prototype
> > > services or realistic example files.
> > I disagree; I think that Markus's "preliminary" concept here is a
> > nice idea.  Transitioning from protocol elements that are non-standard
> > to ones that are standard is generally a messy job from the point of
> > writing or running validators, and this proposal should make that
> > transition smoother.  At the same time the "preliminary" tag will
> > act as a health warning that a client can take account of if it
> > wants to avoid entries that are not properly standardised, so I
> > don't see that the existence of such preliminary terms is likely
> > to cause harm.
> 
> Well, see the second part of my answer to Markus a minute ago.
> 
> If we want to have these preliminary terms in operational services we should
> mark them as preliminary when using them, not only in the vocabulary list.

>From a client/consumer point of view, I think that the preliminary
flag in the vocabularly is sufficient to indicate this.
In fact I've already written code in my VOTable validator to parse
this vocabulary information at runtime (using desise format) so
that validation messages can be reported appropriately.

> And I still think it may be a heavier task for providers to implement these 
> preliminary terms and have to change them several times.

... but I can't comment on this from personal experience, since I'm
not a service implementor.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/