RFC initiated for Simple Cone Search protocol

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Doug Tody wrote:

> A 1-month Request For Comments period on the draft SCS V1.0 specification
> has therefore been initiated.  Please review the specification, and post
> any comments both to the RFC page at
>
>    http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ConeSearchV10RFC
>
> as well as to the DAL WG mailing list (dal at ivoa.net).  The most recent

Doug and DALs,

here are some comments, mostly minor.

    "Compliance REQUIRES that a web service be maintained responds to...":
       Needs rewording.

    "RA -- a right-ascension in the J2000 coordinate system..." (also DEC):
       Coordinate systems are not my thing, but J2000 looks like an
       epoch to me, rather than a coordinate system.  Shouldn't
       this say something like "the ICRS coordinate system" or
       "the FK5(J2000)" coordinate system?  However I am happy to
       defer to somebody who knows what they're talking about here.

    "There may be other parameters ... , the service should must ignore
     that parameter":
       Choose either "should" or "must".

    "The basic MIME-type of the HTTP response should be text/xml.  The more
     specific form text/xml;x-votable may optionally be used.":
       "text/xml;x-votable" is not a legal MIME type.
       The generally agreed MIME type for VOTable is
       "application/x-votable+xml", though "text/x-votable+xml" would
       make sense as well (see RFC3023).

    "Exactly one FIELD must have ucd="ID_MAIN", with the type string":
       Technically, "string" is not a VOTable data type.  This should
       probably say something like "with a string type" or "with a
       character array type".

    "In case of error, the service MUST respond with a VOTable that
     contains a single parameter called Error":
       For definiteness, I'd reword as "a single PARAM with name='Error'",
       or "a single PARAM or INFO with name='Error'", depending on
       what best matches current practice.

    Ref [VOTable v1.0]:
       The target of this link is the VOTable 1.1 spec, not the 1.0 one.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/