[nvo-techwg] Time series data

[Doug Tody]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007, Alasdair Allan wrote:

> Rob Seaman wrote:
>> Our interest in VOEvent is precisely to encourage providers 
>> (author/publishers) to converge on standard representations of a standard 
>> DM.  I fear that a provider needing to distribute even straightforward 
>> photometric light curves of modest size will balk at surrounding their 
>> vectors with such a scaffolding of precision XML, where they might 
>> otherwise be convinced to adopt a VOTable or FITS solution, for instance. 
>> There isn't much point in picking a standard that is guaranteed to be 
>> routed around using native data.
>
> I firmly agree with this point of view. As I'm sure everyone expected me 
> to...

I just got back from a trip and haven't been able to go through all
this mail yet.  I just want to say that from the DAL perspective it will
be very attractive to have a common solution for both spectra and time
series, so that essentially the same implementation and interface can be
used for both.  Hence we have a strong preference for basing time series
on Spectrum (more precisely, on the more general spectrophotometric model
upon which Spectrum is based).  As others point out, this would also allow
a simple VOTable/FITS/CSV representation (or any other representation)
based on some subset of the full data model.

 	- Doug