SSAP clients for theoretical spectra

[Doug Tody]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Gerard wrote:

> parameters are supported. Is there anything in TSAP that is essentially
> different from this?

TSAP was essentially a prototype for the current SSAP for theory
data; it just needs to be updated.  It is still ahead of the other
apps in this area though.  The general problem here is not theory
data specifically, but that a fully general application should be
able to support service specific parameters, and dynamically query
these and permit the user to specify arbitrary queries.  This allows
a standard mechanism to be extended to do many things, including
(but not limited to) control params for a theoretical model.

> The problem is I think that clients are in general not yet able to use this
> information.

Yes, of course.

> In the end every SSA service should respond to format=metadata with the
> parameters they support and clients should (eventually) make use of this
> information to at least not send positional queries to services that do not
> support them, and once all metadata is there (getCapabilities will hopefully
> use the requirements form this discussion) GUIs can be generated that
> capture also more generic queries. 

Yes.  I am sure this will be the case soon, but it does not hurt
to encourage this, and bug those responsible for the major apps to
support this capability.

	- Doug