The Napkin Representation (fwd)

[Frederic V. Hessman]

> I am very very wary of additional formats; this has been suggested  
> be fore but
> the beauty of VOTable is precisely that it is very simple and the  
> average
> astronomer in the wild can get to grips with it, whereas the full  
> complexity of
> XML scares us off.  More imporantly, VOTable is so widely used that  
> there are
> many tools in both astronomy adn solar physics which use it.  For  
> example, one
> of the students here has just written a package to raid the MERLIN  
> archive for
> all data on X-ray binaries, process the data with parselTongue, and  
> convert the
> output to a VOTable of variability (flux density v. time at various  
> frequencies)
> which can then be merged or compared with variability data from other
> observatories. The point is, that this is not someone starting with  
> the
> intention of using VO tools, it is someone who happens to find them  
> more useful
> that the alternatives, since VOTables are more likely than any  
> other format to
> be produced by the other data providers and recognised by the tools  
> he wants to
> use... so he is surely not the only one.
>
> So, I would argue that any format in which data are published  
> should be
> intelligible to tools which handle VOTables, without any special  
> extra tools,
> and that all the essential metadata defined in IVOA standards is  
> preserved in
> the VOTables.

I'm no big fan of VOTable, but in this case, I have to agree: a  
VOTable can easily do the same thing as <NapkinLightcurve> but is  
already standardized and there are already parsers and tools.  The  
only complaint can be that VOTable isn't just for lightcurves so one  
has to check for the ucd's - so what, you'll have to do that anyway.

Rick

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------
Dr. Frederic V. Hessman     Hessman at Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE
Institut für Astrophysik          Tel.  +49-551-39-5052
Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1         Fax +49-551-39-5043
37077 Goettingen                 Room F04-133
http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-------------------------
MONET: a MOnitoring NEtwork of Telescopes
http://monet.Uni-Goettingen.de
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-------------------------


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20070705/438ba239/attachment-0001.html>