SSA-1.1

[Petr Skoda]

> Just to let you know, all the MAST spectral services support TARGETNAME
> queries. It
> assumes no name resolution, so you can submit a query such as:
> http://archive.stsci.edu/ssap/search2.php?targetname=mars

Its very nice - but to guess the precise name of the target may be 
difficult. So you have to provide some rules like - ignore the speces, 
ignore the case of letter etc ...
Moreover some wildcard will help

As I see (and want to propose as a standard) you have already most of this 
working on your web form of MAST - I tried M81%, M81*, m81* and even
  *m8*

lets take

m8*
(returns e.g. M87, M81FIELD03 etc)

and in the SQL it is really

WHERE  (fes_targname LIKE 'M8%')


So in fact you do some translation of wildcards to SQL LIKE %...

If I use SSA directly it works as well

http://archive.stsci.edu/ssap/search2.php?targetname=*m8*

It is exactly what I wanted to put in SSA -
define UNIQE way how to encode the wildcards patterns in TARGETNAME=
with the respect to permitted characters in URL GET

Now I know (after reading RFC 2616 and RFC 2396) that probably the only 
one reasonable wildcard characte which does not require escaping in URI is 
the star *

So what I would suggest in TARGETNAME is to
1) strip spaces befre and after string
2) ignore case
3) the * in TARGETNAME replace by % and call TARGETNAME LIKE '%text%'

Even if it did not enter the SSA1.1 I suggest to discuss this issue and 
prepare the rules anyway - it may then be added to other discovery 
interfaces using TARGTENAME (including SSA1.X) x>1 or retroactively as the 
recommended way of using OPTIONAL TARGETNAME

But I still think that we are expected to provide such a standard and 
recommend the TARGETNAME capability of (not only) spectra archives.

And the MAST case simply shows the practical need to implement this 
(driven by the practical request of scientific community instead of of our 
ad-hoc decision that all celestial objects are accessible by coordinates 
as a unique key ...................)


> http://archive.stsci.edu/ssap/search2.php?target=M81&resolver=Don%27t%20Res

Petr Skoda

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*  Petr Skoda                         Phone : +420-323-649201, ext. 361 *
*  Stellar Department                         +420-323-620361           *
*  Astronomical Institute AS CR       Fax   : +420-323-620250           *
*  251 65 Ondrejov                    e-mail: skoda at sunstel.asu.cas.cz  *
*  Czech Republic                                                       *
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