Comments on V1.1 - Future of VOTable

[Mark Taylor]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, martin hill wrote:

> While I appreciate that VOTable can be used to wrap FITS, this is (I hope) a 
> temporary measure while we sort out our data models and representations.  We 
> should recognise it as such and put future effort into producing suitable 
> solutions, not in overloading VOTable to represent all data formats.  FITS files 
> too have limited structures.

I don't see it as a temporary measure.  VOTable is not supposed to 
represent all data formats, FITS is a special case.  From sec 2.3 of
the VOTable document:

   "the transformation of FITS to VOTable is meant to be reversible"

The kind of data (though not metadata) which can be held in a VOTable
is by design compatible with the FITS binary table format, so that 
requiring the possible storage of VOTable bulk data using a FITS 
binary table does not introduce any additional limitations (put another
way, VOTable explicitly accepts the limitations of FITS binary tables 
as far as pure data storage streams go).

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/