SSA-1.1

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

Apologies if I'm missing some context in this response.  I haven't been following this thread, but noticed the TARGETNAME discussion as I was scanning the responses to Petr's email.

On Mon, 18 Apr 2011, Petr Skoda wrote:

> But it could help a lot to have a explicitely defined way how to define the names for TARGETNAME that all servers would support (and I would be very glad to see the status of TARGETNAME in 4.1.2 to be changed to REC (from OPT).

There is a proposal to systematically create URIs to refer to astronomical objects, backed by the SIMBAD list, though the same mechanism would work with other object lists and catalogues with only minor adaptation.  That is, http://domain-tbd.org/id/1575544 would act as a unique name for M31, for example, without any issues of encoding, spaces, case, and so on.

One non-core feature of this scheme is that that name acts as its own metadata lookup: if the URI is dereferenced, it returns information about the object's human-readable name, position, type, and so on.

> To get anything if blindly asking the unknown archive a some kind of wildcard or regular pattern is important.

This proposal doesn't involve a lookup service as such, but could be extended to include that, in the fairly unlikely case that this couldn't be straightforwardly accommodated within existing lookup mechanisms.

However, I note the subsequent discussion between Doug and Petr:

>> as name resolution has usually already been performed for SEDs since
>> they combine data from multiple observations, often of well known
>> sources,
> well but you have to collect the parts first which may involve the same problems (look for specific catalog - e.g. the satellite target list and enter the coordinates manually or as a input list.
> 
>> and searches for SEDs are normally performed by object name.
>> Hence this will give us an opportunity to gain more experience with use
>> of this parameter for non-planetary data.  (This is one example
>> BTW of how SEDs and SSA/spectrum can differ).
> 
> I do not see any difference - simply the taget name is an (almost) unique
> identifier of any object - I can be interested in SED of star KEPLER xxxxxx in a archive without knowing the identity of a star (real example - the observer only gets coordinates from the PI) and while writting the FITS the OBJECT is filled naturally with such weird name.
> Does not matter whether it is photometry point or spectrum ....

If I'm reading this correctly, then it sounds as if the features of systematic uniqueness, and lack of ambiguity, are potentially valuable here.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK