[Plastic-devs] spectrum load message

[Mark T. <m.b...@br...>]

Plastic Pals,

I have documented a new proposed message for loading spectra at

   http://eurovotech.org/twiki/bin/view/VOTech/PlasticMessagesProposal

I had discussions with various people at Strasbourg about this;
it is unlike the votable/loadFromURL and fits/image/loadFromURL
messages in that it relates to the semantic content (it's a spectrum)
rather than the data format (it's a FITS file) of the resource
at the URL.  The reason for this is that there is a very wide range
of possible serializations of a spectrum/SED (FITS 1-d array, FITS
binary or ascii table, VOTable, FITS or VOTable serialisations of
DM spectral data model as described at
http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaDataModel/spec98c.pdf, ...),
trying to cope with all possibilities could lead to an explosion
in the number of messages.

There are arguments for and against doing it this way, but on pragmatic
grounds I think this is the most workable solution.  If you disagree,
feel free to continue the debate here.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b...@br... +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/