1. VOTable: Tabular Data for Virtual Observatory François Ochsenbein Roy Williams Clive Davenhall, Daniel Durand, Pierre Fernique, Robert Hanisch, David Giaretta, Tom McGlynn, Alex Szalay, Andreas Wicenec

2. The Context Need of exchanging data in tabular form: Coming from a wide variety of data servers and archives (VO context) Must include the associated metadata in order to be interpretable by applications Must deal with potentially millions of records Existence of FITS

3. VOTable History Astrores at CDS/ESO (June 1999) XSIL at Caltech (June 2000) October 2001: first discussions December 2001: VOTable 0.1 January 2002: Interoperability meeting Strasbourg 15 April 2002: VOTable 1.0 http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/doc/VOTable/ VOTable archives & discussion groups: http://archives.us-vo.org/VOTable/

5. Why XML ? includes in a single document the data and their associated metadata (descriptive data) is of common usage since ~ 3 years can be interpreted  parsers and tools readily available can be visualized (XSL) can be encapsulated in messages

6. A “classical” XML Document William Herschel Procyon 114.827 +05.227 4 5 3 …..

7. Problems of “classical” XML Documents Each data element is, meaning: Huge overheads in terms of volume, required resources, and processing time  Not adapted to multi-million row tables Need to introduce new elements (tags) for each new parameter, or to cross-match a potentially large set of name spaces

8. The VOTable way The metadata part (data description), essentially as a set of and specifications The data part (serialisation), which may be in XML, FITS or binary. VOTables follow the classical tabular presentation where the columns are assumed to be homogeneous in terms of their associated metadata; a VOTable document contains:

9. This parameter is designed to store the observer's name Some bright stars Procyon 114.827 5.227 4 5 3 4 3 2 1 2 3 3 5 6 Vega 279.234 38.782 8 7 8 6 8 6

10. … … … …

12. The and name column label unit standardized unit datatype computer type width character representation precision character representation Arraysize repetition factor ucd standardized parameter category Describe the metadata attached to columns or to the resource

13. The UCDs Interpretation of the table contents Decide whether values can be compared Data mining  S. Derrière's talk on Friday Unified Content Descriptor Categorisation of the parameters listed in the table

14. datatypeMeaningFITSBytes "boolean"LogicalL1 "bit"BitX* "unsignedByte"Byte (0 to 255)B1 "short"Short IntegerI2 "int"IntegerJ4 "long"Long integerK8 "char"ASCII CharacterA1 "unicodeChar"Unicode Character2 "float"Floating pointE4 "double"DoubleD8 "floatComplex"Float ComplexC8 "doubleComplex"Double ComplexM16

15. FITS Compatibility Compatible data types FITS keywords are represented as, e.g. width precision arraysize Array and variable-length arrays may link to existing FITS data sets VOTable was designed to be compatible with existing FITS data tables

16. Data Serialization FITS or BINARY data may be embedded in the document, or remote; compression/encoding may be applied.

17. Existing tools and Servers Several databases are delivering VOTables: HEASARC IPAC NOAO NRAO VizieR SIMBAD (cone search >50 services) VOTable parsers in Perl, Java, C (different types of parsers for different applications) VOTable validators XSLT basic XML/HTML translators

18. DTD or XML-Schema The VOTable rules are existing as a DTD (Document-Type Definition) and in the XML-Schema language (heavily used in developping WebServices applications)

19. VOTable appendices 1.The LINK conventions describing how to get the correlated data (explanations, images, spectra…) based on substitution of the column contents Astrores had two features not implemented in VOTables: … … … … photo/procyon.dat … … photo/vega.dat …

20. VOTable appendices (2) 2. The Query Mechanism using conventions similar to the HTML for retrieving the data from user-supplied constraints Some bright stars  toward more generic WDSL-like solutions ?

21. Conclusions Just version 1.0 … more to come Comments ? Proposals ?  Join the discussion group VOTable@us-vo.org