TAP, skynode, or boutique?

Roy Williams roy at cacr.caltech.edu
Fri Sep 5 08:55:54 PDT 2008


This is fabulous Guy, thank you.

Do you know anyone who is making/planning an implementation of TAP 
3.3.6? In the US, there are several partial implementations of TAP being 
started, but nobody is doing that part of the spec.

Roy


Guy Rixon wrote:
> Roy,
>
> quoting from the TAP/PARAM draft that was current before the Trieste 
> meeting:
>
> *3.3.6 Multi-Position Queries *
> A /multi-position/ query generalizes POS, SIZE to a table of 
> positions, allowing an 
> arbitrarily large number of spatial position-based queries to be executed 
> simultaneously.  In a typical scenario the user uploads a list of the 
> positions of 
> their favorite objects, and executes a spatial cross match against 
> some data 
> table.  The multi-position query provides this simple spatial cross match 
> capability. 
>
> (full text at http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/TableAccess/tap-v0.2.pdf)
>
> Unless the NVO people working on this have found problems, this is 
> still to be part of the initial TAP spec (we'll find next week when we 
> start to edit the proposals into a unified draft).
>
> Therefore, I would expect that you might be able to use TAP 
> installations for cross-match sometime this year with prototypes and 
> next year with production services.
>
> Regards,
> Guy
>
>
> On 5 Sep 2008, at 16:14, 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
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> California Institute of Technology
>> 626 395 3670
>

-- 

California Institute of Technology
626 395 3670



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