Fwd: IVOA Standard Documents - and other standards-defining documents

[Ray Plante]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Martin Hill wrote:
> Can we please include *all* the relevent schemas/etc along with the pdf 
> documents?  That is, we should also move v0.7.3 ADQL schema (*and* any 
> dependent schemas such as 'region'), the ADQL -> SQL translation sheets 
> and the 0.7.3 SkyNode WSDL to the same area of ivoa.net as the pdfs, and 
> suitably namespaced.  These after all define the standard(s) alongside 
> the documents.

I want to inject some caution into this request.

Some time ago, I asked that the ADQL schema adopt the our current 
convention for IVOA schemas:

   http://www.ivoa.net/xml/ADQL/v0.7.4

The motivation behind my request was primarily to establish a 
stable, predictable pattern for the namespace.  In the early development, 
the namespace was changing quite a bit, reaking havoc on our application 
work.  

Choosing a namespace can be tricky.  When it changes, applications break,
so we can't be too cavalier.  With VOResource, we take advantage of the
standard, optional convention to have the namespace URI resolve to the
actual XSD document.  However, the current URI convention was chosen to
favor its use as a URI, rather than its location on the IVOA site.  That
means that we kept the URI fairly short and not reflective of the IVOA
filesystem.

(Note that we didn't post the schemas at the http://www.ivoa.net/xml/ 
location until we had official WD releases.  Thus, in the pre-release 
stage, you cannot resolve the namespace URI to the schema.)

On the other hand, the URLs for the standard (prose) documents favor 
humans locating them via a browser.  Thus, schemas and their related 
standard documents are not together under a common directory.  This was 
not expected to be a problem since we can provide links to both on a 
single page.  

My suggestion is:
  o  keep the current conventions for standard documents and XML schemas
  o  be sure the ADQL standard document includes a link to the proper 
     location of the schema.  This will be a location on the Twiki until 
     the official WD release; then it is changed to the official release 
     location.  
  o  Ask to the document coordinator (Marco) to allow links to associated 
     schemas to be appear on the document download page. 

cheers,
Ray