concept representation/displaying language?

Carlos Rodrigo Blanco crb at laeff.inta.es
Wed Jun 3 08:10:26 PDT 2009


As we are talking about vocabularies I've remembered a question that I 
posted to the semantics group and I didn't get much help about...

In some cases, we have to include in VOTables quantities (params, 
fields...) that are not predefined in a protocol or data model or 
whatever (the point is: no application will have a precoded way to
handle it)

I would like to be able to tell the client (application) how that quantity 
should be displayed (formated). To give a simple example, I would like to 
be able to tell the application that this parameter that I call teff 
should be writen as T_{eff} (latex notation). In this teff case it is 
not very important, but in other cases it is... it's quite ugly to write 
alpha_gamma_square when you can write \frac{\alpha}{\gamma}^2 (again latex 
notation). And I think that applications should be as friendly to users as 
posible.

I can point to vocabularies telling the definition of quantities and 
relation between quantities, I know, but it doesn't help.

Does any one have any idea about such a thing? (You always can include a 
table with fields saying how other fields must be represented using 
<!CDATA... and so but, being it a solution, it seems to be just a patch 
as the application, a priori, wouldn't know that it has to look for the 
information there)

(I've seen before that the question seems difficult to understand when I 
write it, so it might mean that I don't know well how to explain it, I'm 
sorry)

Carlos



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