A Grey Eminence of a Standard

Examples for extra metadata: extended column descriptions on the web pages accompanying the ARI-Gaia TAP service.

Last friday, I've uploaded a first working draft of VODataService 1.2 to the IVOA documents repository. That's the first major step in updating a standard, and it's an invitation to everyone to have a look and comment.

Foof, you might say, what do I care? I've not even heard of that standard.

Well, but you've probably used it. VODataService is (among several other things) the standard that governs how a TAP service tells clients (TOPCAT, say) what tables it has and what's inside of them. So, if you see in TOPCAT that there is a column named ang_error with a unit of deg, a UCD of stat.error;pos and the meaning “1 σ confidence radius of the position”, that most likely came in a document standardised by VODataService.

The question of what (TAP) services can tell clients about their table set is one major open point: Do we want additional metadata there? This article's image, for inspiration, shows a screenshot of extended metadata Grégory delivers to browsers on his ARI-Gaia service; among this are minima, maxima, means, standard deviations, quartiles, and fill factors (i.e., how many of the columns are NULL). He even shows histograms of the values' distributions and HEALPix maps showing how (the means of) the values vary on the sky. Another example of extended metadata could be footnotes as you will find them on many of my resources' reference URLs (example; footnotes are, unsurprisingly, near the foot of that page).

We could define interoperable means to communicate information like this. The question is: does the added value justify the complication in implementation? This is where it would be great if you weighed in, in particular if you are a “mere” TAP user: Are there any such pieces of metadata you've always wanted to see in your TAP interfaces? Oh, and metadata of course can also be added to tables rather than columns. The current draft already lets services communicate the number of rows in each table – is there more “simple”, table-specific metadata of this sort?

VODataService furthermore deals with several other topics; for instance, the STC in the registry business I've blogged about in February is going to be standardised here (update on this: spectral coverage is no longer in wavelength but in energy). Other changes are rather more technical in nature, like several new resource types that will improve the discovery of tables and other such resources, or a careful adjustment of some features to keep them in line with TAP evolution.

But don't let the technicalities scare you away – just have a peek, and if you have thoughts on any of the VODataService topics: I'm just a mail away.