any application using datalink?

[Carlos Rodrigo]

Thanks a lot for all your answers

I am right now trying to develope DataLink services attached to catalogues, that is, to ConeSearch
responses. And I would like to test these services with some external application.

I see, that, by now, there is not such application. But I'm happy to see that many of you are
interested in providing some solutions in the near future.

The fact is that I see that most astronomers, when ask us to develope a service for their data
(catalogues, collections of spectra...) always want to relate other resources to the main data. For
instance, for catalogues, there are usually links to images, spectra, references or external
resources that complement or explain the catalogue data.

It is quite easy to put all this information together in a web page. But it is not so easy to do so
in the VO services. Datalink provides such capability. But, in my opinion, if VO applications don't
show the corresponding information in some "nice" way, it is not so easy to convince astronomers
that having a VO service for their data is better (or at least "as good as") having just a web page.

of course, Datalink is a new protocol, there are few implementations, and the situation will surely
improve with time.

I intend to comment about this in next Asterics meeting and next interop too. So we can talk about
it if more people are interested.

Thanks again for your answers.

Carlos


On 15/03/17 10:45, Mark Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2017, Carlos Rodrigo wrote:
> 
>> Hi
>>
>> is anybody aware of any VO application that is able to handle datalink content?
>>
>> I mean, if the application receives a votable with a resource pointing to a datalink service, it
>> tells the user "there are more links related to this result" and then, at least, offers the user to
>> visualize the list of available links
>>
>> of something like that.
>>
>> is there any application able to do something similar? or planning to do it in a near future?
> 
> Speaking for topcat: there is no datalink functionality right now.
> However, it's been looming over my to-do list for a while, and
> I agreed recently in the context of the upcoming Gaia DR2 (next year)
> that I will provide some kind of datalink awareness in topcat
> in the forseeable future.
> 
> I don't yet have a clear idea what this would look like.  I'm not
> sure it makes sense for a general table-handling application like
> topcat to act as a fully featured datalink client with the
> capability of allowing users to construct queries for non-table
> data according to a datalink-specified parameter list.
> Displaying a list of available (static) links as you suggest
> sounds more like what I'd imagine.
> 
> But if people have requirements/ideas/advice in this area
> I'd be happy to discuss it (maybe at the ASTERICS meeting next week).
> 
> Mark
> 
> --
> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
>