TAP, skynode, or boutique?

[Nicholas A Walton]

Dear Roy,

there used to be a skynode at Cambridge, but it is no longer maintained. 
the skynode protocol had too many limitations to make it useful. It may 
have improved in more recent times, but i think it might be better for 
you to go with the TAP specification now.

Yours, Nic

Roy Williams wrote:
> 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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Dr N. A. Walton
Institute of Astronomy          Tel:   +44 1223 337503
University of Cambridge         Fax:   +44 1223 337523
Madingley Road                  WWW:   http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~naw
Cambridge, CB3 0HA              email: naw at ast.cam.ac.uk
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