SSA-1.1

[Petr Skoda]

>
> like Myron, I think that is a usually a bad idea.


OK I am giving up - - to solve the problem on which  are several 
groups of people in IAU working for years is impossible by simple rules;-)

I wanted to make easier the practical usage of TARGETNAME to motivate 
people by finding in cca 80% what they wanted (but as I remember in IVOA 
there was mentioned many times the 80-20 rule to explain why one should 
not deal with details - usual answer was we should have something to start 
with) - but evidently this is not accepted here as too many people want
to be exact and recommend either complicate rules (full RE and escaping) 
or to be strict and forbid every possible amiguity ;-)
Now we even have learned that SIMBAD is doing this in a wrong way ;-)

OK

I am glad that there are some people supporting my original idea that the 
TARGETNAME is sometimes important and there is definitely the need (and 
will appear for sure in future again) to prepare some formalism for such 
type of queries. However, it is not yet the right time to recommend 
anything until we get more experience .....

Unfortunately  as Markus wants...

>IMHO that should be: "There are no metacharacters in
>TARGETNAME. Clients should not assume any case folding or
>whitespace normalization on the server side.  Servers are free to
>perform case folding and/or whitespace normalization."

But maybe I have understood this in a wrong way -
perhaps it does not mean "There is not allowed any metacharacter in 
TARGETNAME parameter (in queries)"  - otherwise adding this to SSA would 
break already (well) running SSA of MAST and others who support some 
wildcards in  TARGETNAME queries silently...

The practical way of using the query by identifier in web archives and 
SIMBAD (I have observed both my colleagues and many students) is very 
similar to the layman's usage of google -  to write part  of the name 
and if it returns to much adding more constrains. In best case someone 
tries the asterisk as is in unix filenames.

So what to do ?

As I understand all objections to case-insensitive search of star names 
follows from the problem introduced by Johann Bayer in 1603 - i.e. after 
exhhausting greek letters he decided to use low case a-z and then upcase 
A-Z.

So this is a critical ambiguity as is shown below: by B.deBatz

In this case it would be the solution such a rule:
"Ignore the case UNTIL there is a single letter "

Other problems like ambiguity in writing constellation name
or greek letter (even shortened to 3 letters as in Simbad - Alp, alp..aLp)
or variable stars like RS, rs, v355, V355 ... could be solved (I hope) 
by simple ignoring of case.
Or does anybody has another example of ambiguity except of Bayer names ?

Concerning argument "the * is part of many names"

I think that probably no one uses * as part of name - it is just a 
formalism introduced by SIMBAD  (after GCVS) as a class marker on output

Does anyone have  TARGETNAME with * ?


Of course the TARGETNAME entered in SQL databases during the process of 
making them VO-compliant should be first converted to some canonical name
(and we should give rules for this), but even then some wildcards will be 
needed just to asume the type of contents (do they have any GALEX object 
observed ? ..   TARGETNAME=GALEX*.) 
>
> If you ask with identifier "z Pub" (a Be star B3Vne) Simbad answers with
> V* Z Pup (a Mira type star M4e)

Thanks for numerous suggestions and commnents

Petr

*************************************************************************
*  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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