Server-side Operations for Data Access version 1.0 Proposed Erratum 3: Wrong VOTable syntax in BAND example
Author: François Bonnarel
Date last changed: 2023-01-23
Date accepted:
Rationale
In section 4.2, the VOTable excerpt given for the BAND PARAM is somewhat ambiguous for the MIN and MAX elements syntax. The values of these elements are single doubles while the BAND arraysize attribute is 2. It has to be clarified that the MIN single value applies to the two elements in the BAND array as well as the MAX value. This is consistent with a generic rule for MIN/MAX values for array-valued PARAMs and FIELDS as described in the VOTable specification starting for version 1.5. In addition the closing tag of the VALUES element is wrongly written
<verbatim></VALUE></verbatim>
instead of
<verbatim></VALUES></verbatim>
This ambiguity orignally described on github in
SODA issue #2 (
https://github.com/ivoa-std/SODA/issues/2)
Erratum Content
This Erratum proposes following changes.
Fix VOTable syntax
In
§4.2 "*SODA Service Descriptor from DataLink*" of SODA-1.0, update the BAND text and example in
from
For float-valued intervals (e.g., the standard BAND and TIME parameters), VALUES/MIN and VALUES/MAX should be used to communicate the range
of values for which clients can expect to receive data. Example:
<PARAM name="BAND" unit="m" ucd="em.wl;stat.interval"
datatype="double" arraysize="2"
xtype="interval" value="">
<DESCRIPTION>The wavelength intervals to be extracted</DESCRIPTION>
<VALUES>
<MIN value="3e-7"/>
<MAX value="8e-7"/>
</VALUE>
</PARAM>
<MIN value="3e-7"/>
to
<MIN value="3e-7 5.5e-7"/>
from
<MAX value="8e-7"/>
to
<MAX value="2e-7 8e-7"/>
from
</VALUE>
to
</VALUES>
Impact Assessment
Fixing the VOTable syntax in an example will make no harm to any service and will avoid implementers writing code delivering incorrect VOTables.