WD-SIA-2.0-20140512 available

[Walter Landry]

Douglas Tody <dtody at nrao.edu> wrote:
> Support for simple image mosaic (and cutout) capabilities is an
> important capability that is not currently adequately addressed.  As
> you say this capability has been in V1 for over ten years now.  In
> principle an SIAV2 interface could describe a virtual image such as
> a cutout or mosaic, however there is no support for this in the
> current specification, and the critical spatial query portion only
> provides a simple discovery capability for static archival images
> (the concept of the "ideal image" has been dropped).
> 
> If people want these capabilities - speak up.  We already do all these
> things in prototype interfaces, but there has not been sufficient
> agreement to include such capabilities in the V2 specification.

As someone who is currently implementing a mosaic service, I do not
think that the SIA model fits well.  Perhaps I have a lack of
imagination, but I would think that a mosaic service will either
succeed or fail.  It will not give several results that you then can
choose which to download.

In that case, mosaic services are much more aligned with AccessData.
Mosaic services give the illusion of multi-dimensional dataset by
computing transforms on the fly.  My main complaint about AccessData
is that it is woefully incomplete.

Cheers,
Walter Landry