gzipped images in SIAP 1.0 (fwd)

[Anita M. S. Richards]

On Thu, 31 May 2007, Doug Tody wrote:


> This issue of returning an image with other associated non-image
> information came up in the SIA V2 session in Beijing.  The idea
> floated at the time was for the queryData to return two records per
> image in such a case, one for only the image (any client can deal with
> this), and the other for the "full" set of data, e.g., a tar or zip
> containing the image plus some unspecified provider-specific auxiliary
> information.  An alternative might be to return a FITS MEF containing
> this information if we want something a bit more fully defined.
> We could certainly do this, but depending upon how it is done, it is
> not clear how a client application would deal with what comes back.

I'd vote for the first option at present since the auxillary data might be 
e.g. weight maps, but it might also be VOTables, plain text or anything 
else... we should see how the first option works and what people actualy 
use it for to begin with.

>
> Regarding directly interrogating FITS headers - I am not sure what
> you mean by that Anita.  Surely a good SIAP implementation, even for
> SIAP V1.0, extracts the header metadata into a DBMS and uses this to
> process queries?  Most SIAP implementations that I have seen already
> do this.  With SIAP V2, we will have much richer metadata, similar
> to what is available now for SSAP (Char etc.), and this approach will
> become even more essential.
>

It's good to hear that - I missed Beijing so I am a bit behind the 
times... but my impression up to a couple of months ago was that many of 
the people who occasionally dip their toes into VO publishing/developing 
thought mainly about FITS... We do have to make sure that the methods 
developed by big projects and archives can be saled and communicated in 
ways which places with small resources can handle - but what you described 
should certainly help that.

cheers
a

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Anita M. S. Richards, AstroGrid Astronomer
MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, University of Manchester, 
Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL, U.K. 
tel +44 (0)1477 572683 (direct); 571321 (switchboard); 571618 (fax).