VOTable alternative? Mapping Rich Data to DBMSs

[Bob Mann]

	Hi folks,

	I've only had time to skim this fascinating discussion, but wanted
to pick up on one thing. Several people have made reference to BinX - see
http://www.edikt.org/binx/ - which does several of the things that have
been discussed as desirables during this discussion, such as

> > 3. Annotate the combined schema with attributes that say where to find
> > individual data in the binary table.

> > 4. Process the binary via a library that provides XML-like features,
> > mainly XPath and XSLT.  The library works on {binary-file, XSD} tuples.

	XPath is on the To Do list still for BinX, but it is expected to
happen.

	I've been working with the BinX team and, as a simple test, we've
got translation between VOTable and FITS binary tables working both ways
(modulo the slight differences in their data models). Now, as has been
said before, this in itself is no great achievement, and others have done
it before, but what's neat about the thinking behind BinX - which is what
is also driving the GGF Data Format Description Language WG - is that,
armed with a SchemaBinX file (basically Guy's XSD file above) you
can readily convert from a given binary file into any format you can
create using XSLT. So, you don't need N*(N-1) utilities for conversion
between N data formats.

	There's a long overdue Action on me to write a note on BinX for
the AstroGrid wiki. I hope to get to that next week, and will post the URL
for it to this list once it's done.

	cheers

	Bob