On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, David Berry wrote:
> Mark,
>
> > I'm not up to date on the data model stuff, but I wouldn't say I was
> > expecting a Quanity to be expressible as a VOTable. Might be sensible,
> > might not, but I certainly wouldn't start from the assumption that it is.
> > To me, a VOTable is a good way of expressing tabular data, and I
> > didn't think that a Quantity was going to be particularly tabular.
> > If you're coming up with an XML-based serialization format it
> > might be a good idea to specify it with reference to VOTable so that
> > similar things look similar though.
>
> I was referring to your comment that VOTable would be OK for storing
> spectra or time-series. These are the sort of things (plus images, cubes,
> etc) which we have had in mind whilst working on Quantity - a spectra
> represents some "Flux" quantity as a function of channel
> no./wavelength/whatever.
Ah, I see. What I said was:
As far as time series
are tabular data I'd have thought with appropriate use of UCDs
they would fit happily in VOTables.
.. as far as they are N-dimensional arrays (even with N=1) then
I'd expect them to be stored in some non-table, array-friendly way
(quantity or FITS array or whatever - some of the hierarchical
superstructure, i.e. the bits above the TABLE element itself
might look like VOTable though).
I may well be talking out of my hat on these topics - I don't really
know the first thing about time series. My impression was basically
that they were a list of time,value pairs, but I could
be way off the mark. I suppose you could put this in a (VO) table,
but I'd have thought that array-like storage made more sense.
Mark
--
Mark Taylor Starlink Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
[log in to unmask] +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
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