VOEvent packet conformance test results

[Bob Denny]

For reference, I thought I'd post my findings on VOEvent packet conformance. To
do this, I used copies of all of the packets that have flowed through the eStar
VOEvent broker from 01-Jan-2007 through 03-Mar-2008 (13,732 of them). I ran them
through my validating packet parser to find the ones that did't validate.

Here are the problems I found:

* Malformed xsi:schemaLocation attribute; schema name and location URL must be
separated by whitespace, which is missing.

* Coordinate system id value "FK5-UTC-GEO" in several places under
AstroCoordSystem; it should be UTC-FK5-GEO.

* Use of EventID element, it must be EventIVORN.

* Description element under Why element enclosed -within- a Name element. It
must be a peer of Name, not a child.

* Param element containing ‘units’ attribute; the attribute name must be ‘unit’
(singular)

* AstroCoordSystem element containing ‘ID’ attribute; it must be ‘id’ (lower case).

* Inclusion of an Instrument element and sub-elements; these are not defined in
the VOEvent schema.

* Illegal value for the ISOTime element (form yyyymmdd); it must be a valid ISO
8601 date/time (form yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss).

  -- Bob