Talk:Proposal 0.4

Fix mandatory metadata

The table is in the main page. I used the following rules:

• Mandatory because without this metadata any conventions will fail
• Or, mandatory because users might forget it, resulting in inconsistencies for all conventions

In other words, my suggestion represents the minimal version of any conventions. Let's see if this is consistent...

Fix versioning of SOFA and conventions

For the moment, we have a version number for the SOFA specs and each conventions has its own version number. This appears rather much, but gives us more freedom (formulate that!)

Fix if datatypes can change within conventions

When we say "conventions" do we mean a fixed data type?

• yes: because it will be very easy for applications: they just have to check the conventions and the data type is fixed. On the other hand, we'll need a separate conventions for each datatype even though the measurement setup might have not changed.
• no: we will have conventions which do not consider the datatype (=less conventions). On the other hand, each application has either to provide all datatypes or to check two things: conventions and datatype