VOTable v1.3: Request For Comments

This page contains public discussion of the VOTable v1.3 Proposed Recommendation. The RFC is announced on 29 March 2013 and will run until 29 April 2013.

Version under review

PR-VOTable-1.3-20130315

RFC Review Period

29 March 2013 - 29 April 2013

Change Overview

Changes since the previous version 1.2 are mainly in the areas of representation of null values and serialization. A detailed list of the changes is available in section 9.2 of the document.

This version of the document has been developed within the public subversion repository Volute, in directory projects/votable, where the exact changes made to the LaTeX source and XML Schema can be seen.

Implementations and Validators

VOTable 1.3 has been implemented in the following software items:

• STIL 3.0-4/STILTS 2.5/TOPCAT 4.0b
• The GAVO TAP service at http://dc.g-vo.org/tap
• SAVOT release 4.0

-- MarkTaylor - 2013-03-28

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Additional discussion about any of the comments or responses may be conducted on the votable@ivoa.net mailing list. However, please enter your initial comments here for full consideration in any future revisions of this document.

IVOA Community Comments during the RFC period (29 March 2013 - 26 April 2013)

(please add comments here)

TCG Comments during the RFC period (29 Match 2013 - 26 April 2013)

(TCG members are encouraged to consider the document during the RFC stage so that any problems can be addressed before the TCG Review stage when the chair or vice chair of each WG will be required to review it).

* Theory Interest Group

Comments by Franck on the 2nd April 2013

As mentionned during the discussions on the mailing list, it would be useful the document would be more precise on the way to include semantics concepts (as SKOS) in a VO-Table.

Mark suggested two solutions :

1) external communities (like Theory I.G.) could define their own conventions like content-role="skos"

2) use content-role="type"

Maybe solution 2 is better than solution 1 since somebody implementing VO-Table may not be aware of all the possibilities defined by each community.

So would it be possible to specify this in the documentation of VO-Table adding, in section 3.5, the sentence suggested by Mark during the discussions on the mailing list :

"This content-role value would for instance be appropriate to mark the LINK's href value as a SKOS concept."