Scope

[mbtaylor]

The Scope section explicitly narrows the content of this document down to use of VOTable within Parquet, in the interest of getting it completed as soon as possible. This is the sense that I got from the 5 November 2024 Apps telecon about what people wanted. But widening this scope is a possibility.

[fxpineau]

It seems to me that the current scope is as narrow as "VOTable metadata in Parquet".
So I'm wondering whether the current title “Parquet in the VO” is too broad for the current content.
Maybe you already have some ideas for enriching (in the future) the note with Parquet specific materials (like HATS?).

Another option might be a title like "VOTable metadata for less-rich-metadata file formats".
If so, FITS-plus could be added to the note, either in the future, or now if there is already a broad consensus to accept it more or less as it is.
The "issues" addressed in the document are similar for VOTable metadata in Parquet and for VOTable metadata in FITS: DATA-less VOTable inside the file; data and datatypes of the file format are authoritative, ...
Is the IVOA going to make two separated notes with a very similar content (for Parquet and FITS)?

[mbtaylor]

The question of the title is a fair point, I wasn't sure what to call it, but I wanted to leave open the possibility to widen the scope a bit if discussions went that way. And although the normative content is indeed at present only VOTable metadata in Parquet, there's a bit of discussion of the context as well. I suggest we leave it as is for now, but re-assess at the end of the editing period whether the title should change.

Concerning future development I don't think this will be the last document on this topic. My current idea is that we get out this Note (or possibly Endorsed Note) as something concrete that people can implement against ASAP. Once we have some implementation experience we could revisit it, maybe as a Recommendation-track document, and maybe with enhanced scope that might say more about Parquet usage, or take in other formats like FITS(-plus), or both. I'd hope that any normative content in such a future document would be consistent with the normative content of this Note.