TAP1.0 Comments

[Francois Ochsenbein]

Thank you Paul -- that is exactly my point !

And in fact VOTable was designed to accomodate this
kind of complex result -- that's why from its origins
VOTable accepts a set of tables rather than a single 
table...

Cheers, Francois

>
>
>On 2009-07 -15, at 12:38, Douglas Tody wrote:
>
>> Basically what this would allow you to do is build an index table for
>> all the 8000 or so Vizier tables.  It could be queried with a GDS  
>> query
>> (in TAP probably) to find the tables of interest.  These would then
>> be queried individually with TAP.  Aside from being simpler, I think
>> this is more convenient and flexible for the client than getting all
>> the query responses in one big file from which they would then have
>> to be extracted.  If we really wanted that it could be done with an
>> integrator service of some sort.
>
>
>Doug,
>
>I think that you have missed the point here - Vizier *is* such an  
>integrator service. This was precisely what François was saying, and  
>pointing out that the client does not want the inefficiency of doing  
>1+N queries where N is a large number when in fact they could do just  
>one when querying Vizier. I think that the additional point that was  
>made was that in an all catalogue search Vizier can return different  
>columns for each table (catalogue) that matches, which is why François  
>wants to be able to issue multiple tables within a single VOTable  
>document. It seems rather a shame to disallow this in TAP in many ways  
>as VOTable is supposed to be self describing, so that the client  
>should be able to "understand" the multi table result just as easily  
>as they can a single table result.
>
>Cheers,
>	Paul.
>
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Francois Ochsenbein    ------   Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg
   11, rue de l'Universite 67000 STRASBOURG  Phone: +33-(0)390 24 24 29
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