TAP, skynode, or boutique?

[Roy Williams]

Dear DAL WG

I am writing to ask if the Skynode protocol will continue to be 
supported in the broader IVOA. Most of the current implementations seem 
to be at Johns Hopkins University -- is that true? Are there other 
skynodes out there that are and will be properly maintained?

A group of us in US-VO are developing an application (Vim) that handles 
multiple sky positions by running proximity (cone) searches against 
published catalogs. Thus a single click of the mouse can cause execution 
of a thousand separate cone searches against a single server. This can 
be very slow, and we would like to scale things up. We want a crossmatch 
service -- by which I mean no more than multiple cone searches. We want 
to do a thousand or a million cone searches in one "crossmatch" request.

Which of these paths should the Vim team follow:

(1) After years of discussion in this WG, I am still not seeing the 
emergence of anything like simple crossmatch in the TAP specification. 
So I guess we are still more years from widespread, solid implementation 
of TAP that can do crossmatch. Is that true?

(2) The Skynode protocol can do crossmatch already, and I wonder if this 
is the direction the Vim team should follow instead of waiting for TAP. 
However, before doing this, we would really like an assurance that there 
will continue to be multiple organizations supporting Skynode!

(3) The third way to get fast crossmatch would be to look through all 
the data center web pages looking for their own crossmatch services (eg 
[1][2][3]), and then build a custom interface from Vim to each data center.

Thank you for your help
Roy



[1] http://cas.sdss.org//dr6/en/tools/crossid/upload.asp
[2] http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/Gator/GatorAid/Gator_Api.html
[3] http://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/vizHelp?file.htx

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