RFC initiated for Simple Spectral Access protocol

[Robert Hanisch]

I believe these comments belong in the RFC record, but I've said that
already.  For now I want to address just a couple of Jesus' remarks.

On 6/25/07 6:56 AM, "Jesus Salgado" <Jesus.Salgado at sciops.esa.int> wrote:

> Apart from these open issues for native data, there are other points to
> be corrected:
> 
> - There is not any special description of the FORMAT=METADATA paradigm.
> I know the idea is to replace it in the future, but we agreed to use it
> from the time being. To accept a recommendation status for the document,
> the document should be self-consistent. This point is particularly
> important for the theoretical services.

There is a full exposition of this in sections 6.1 and 6.2, pp. 37-38.  Is
this inadequate?

> - POS and SIZE input parameters still remain as a MUST. This is
> contradictory with the inclusion of theoretical spectral in the spec.
> This has been remarked before and the answer was that implement a
> parameter does not mean that this parameter has sense to your data. I
> think this is quite bizarre and it should be clarified (or remove the
> "mandatority" of the parameter)

The rationale for this is explained clearly in section 4.1, p. 17, and it
makes sense to me that clients issuing SSA requests should not have to
change those requests depending on whether or not they are going to
observational data or theoretical data.   The latter certainly may have POS
and/or BAND associated with them (model spectra for a particular galaxy,
say).  The document describes what the service should do if these parameters
are not relevant (bottom of the same page), and these seem like reasonable
behaviors to me.

Bob