V2

[Tony Linde]

Yes, I was coming to the same conclusion. We have data, contextual
information (where the data came from and what it is about) and
representational metadata (how this particular set of data is represented in
this place).

I guess the confusion arises because it is all being referred to as
'metadata', which may or may not be correct but to a computing professional
is misleading.

There's no problem with the data and representational metadata but we need a
schema for the contextual information.

And is it valid to have FIELD elements in the contextual information since
they are really representational, aren't they? Is a UCD part of the
representation of the element, like its datatype, or part of the element's
context?

(And is 'context' the right word?)

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-votable at eso.org [mailto:owner-votable at eso.org] On 
> Behalf Of Martin Hill
> Sent: 21 January 2004 19:12
> To: votable at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: V2
> 
> 
> Tony said:
> 
> > Surely it would be much simpler to accept that VOTable is simply a 
> > mechanism for transporting a table along with its metadata 
> but that to 
> > use standard xml tools on the data you need to split them 
> into their 
> > normal separate
> > components: data and metadata. (But you could leave them 
> together if you
> > really want to work on the combined file.)
> 
> As I understand it so far, there is no mechanism for putting 
> astronomical 
> metadata (eg UCDs, related passband info, etc) into schemas.  
> We actually have 
> two layers of metadata - one describing the structure and 
> overall naming of the 
> data (schema), and another with values eg as above (votable 
> header) that give 
> context to the data values.
> 
> Martin
> -- 
> Software Engineer
> AstroGrid @ ROE
> Tel: +44 7901 55 24 66
> www.astrogrid.org
> 
>