SSAP clients for theoretical spectra

[Doug Tody]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Carlos Rodrigo Blanco wrote:

> - At a registry level the only way to register these services is a SSAP
> services. This mean that applications will query the services by
> position/object name and the services will never ask annything useful. There's
> no way to register them as TSAP, meaning that, even though the service
> conformes with SSAP specification, it does not answers to position queries and
> it needs a previous format=metadata query for finding the query parameters.
> 
> I thing that this lack of a proper way to register theoretical spectra
> services is very important. It makes these services almost invisible to the
> applications (as they wouldn't know how to find which ones are available). And
> maybe that is the reason why most application developers haven't felt the need
> to implement a way to access theoretical spectra services.

I agree that searching the registry for theory-SSAP serices is a
problem currently, but we should be able to address this in SSA
V1.1 once we have getCapabilities.  Then it should be possible to
search the registry for SSA services for which DataSource="theory"
(or something along those lines).

The client apps do need to get smarter in terms of queries, so that
queries can specify any parameter and not be limited to position.  I am
sure that this will happen (I know some folks are already looking at
this), however you need to give them time.  SSA only recently became
a REC.

I am not sure I understand the comments earlier about using TAP to
access a service which returns synthetic spectra.  A theory-SSA service
returns spectra and requires passing in custom parameters to define the
model parameters, for which SSA would seem to be a much better choice.

	- Doug