Bringing VOEvent v2.0 home to roost

[Mike Fitzpatrick]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Roy Williams <roy at cacr.caltech.edu> wrote:

>
>      - Would like to see a simplified view of the schema
>>
>
> Done


The graphic in the v2.0 PR draft is illegible in the PDF version.  What I
had
in mind were simple text tables of element/attributes as was done in the
VOTable REC.



        Does this need to be camelCase,
>>
>
> Perhaps it should have been "datatype". However, I have written a bunch of
> code against "dataType" and would prefer not to change it. It was a week of
> great enthusiasm for camelCase, since deflated.


It's not a major issue, but I don't think the existence of code doing
something
else has been used as an excuse for not making changes in a PR doc .....



>
> Any data object can be linked as a Reference, including Tables. The
> Reference can point to a VOTable or a FITS table or a text table. You can
> have *either* <Table> to include it in the packet, *or* <Reference> to point
> to an external data object. Anyway, I just removed the sentence "It should
> be noted ..." as it is obviously confusing.


Maybe I misunderstood your reply, but the latest draft still allows a
<Reference>
within a <Table> so my original comment still stands.  Are you saying that
the expected use is assumed to be that these exclusive even if the schema
allows a <Reference> in the <Table>?

An example where this might be useful is if the <Table> were a subset of
some external data object in the <Reference> (i.e. just the minimum info
needed in the packet), but there is nothing like a 'role' attribute of
<Reference> to indicate this relationship.



One last comment:  As an application developer I'm not sure I find the
<Reference> all that useful.  I understand the desire to be able to link to
any external content, but what I'd like to see is something like a mime
type attribute so my app can decide whether it can handle whatever
the data might be.  The 'uri' is essentially free text, you say it's in a
URI
syntax but a value like "http://.../data-models/#h-filter-image" is
meaningless unless the app knows what to expect (or just treats it
as bulk data for download).  The case for a reference to another event
packet is pretty clear, but how do you expect apps to use e.g the
<Reference> in a <Param> ???

Cheers,
-Mike
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