IVOA Recommendation: VODataService: a VOResource Schema Extension for Describing Collections and Services Version 1.1

TL;DR

This paper introduces an XML schema extension, VODataService, for describing astronomical data collections and services, enhancing metadata detail for resource discovery and coverage description in the Virtual Observatory framework.

Contribution

It defines a new VOResource schema extension that allows detailed description of sky, frequency, and time coverage, and tabular data, improving resource metadata for astronomical services.

Findings

Enables detailed coverage descriptions using STC standard

Supports comprehensive descriptions of tabular data

Facilitates discovery of astronomical data services

Abstract

VODataService refers to an XML encoding standard for a specialized extension of the IVOA Resource Metadata that is useful for describing data collections and the services that access them. It is defined as an extension of the core resource metadata encoding standard known as VOResource [Plante et al. 2008] using XML Schema. The specialized resource types defined by the VODataService schema allow one to describe how the data underlying the resource cover the sky as well as cover frequency and time. This coverage description leverages heavily the Space-Time Coordinates (STC) standard schema [Rots 2007]. VODataService also enables detailed descriptions of tables that includes information useful to the discovery of tabular data. It is intended that the VODataService data types will be particularly useful in describing services that support standard IVOA service protocols.