getCapabilities in SSAP

[Igor Chilingarian]

Dear Doug and DAL group,

We are working on the SSA access to the spectra of Be stars (project by 
Bertrand de Batz and Coralie Neiner at the Observatory of Paris).
We would like to implement the service, fully-compliant to the latest version 
of the SSAP document. Several questions have raised during the process of 
implementation.

1) REQUEST=getCapabilities. In the version of the document, which we use 
(v0.97) it is written that "getCapabilities" should be similar to VOResource. 
And no more details. We have tried to check the examples on the SSAP services 
you had announced a couple of weeks ago, and we got "HTTP-404 error" for the 
.xml file corresponding to this query. Could you please provide an example of 
such a response? We would like to implement some service-specific parameters, 
which have major scientific interest, but we do not know how to describe them 
in the getCapabilities.

2) Query Response metadata. There are several parameters specified as 
MANDATORY, such as Char.SpatialAxis.Coverage.Location.Value, 
Char.SpatialAxis.Coverage.Bounds.Extent, and 
Char.TimeAxis.Coverage.Location.Value, which are not applicable for some sorts 
of data, such as synthetic spectra, or even for observations of point sources 
(e.g. stars), where "aperture angular diameter" does not bear much useful 
information and is quite often unknown. The question is: are we allowed to put 
"N/A" as the values for mandatory metadata fields?

3) Multi-language support for the descriptions of parameters. For a particular 
case of Be stars database we have all the descriptions made in several 
languages, and it seems to be very useful to be able to display them in the 
client application correspondingly to the language setting there (e.g. Aladin 
with multi-language support, announced yesterday by CDS). What do you think 
about adding one more query parameter (RECOMMENDED or OPTIONAL), for example, 
LANG accepting the I18N values such as "en","fr","sp","it", etc. with the 
default setting to English?

With best regards,
 				Igor Chilingarian and Pierre Le Sidaner