TAP 1.1 comments

[Patrick Dowler]

comments below

On 8 May 2016 at 16:55, Walter Landry <wlandry at caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Here are some comments on the TAP 1.1 proposal.
>
> 1) The text proposes
>
>      INTERSECTS and CONTAINS are required. POINT, CIRCLE, and POLYGON
>      are required. POINT (and point-valued columns) cannot be used as
>      an argument to INTERSECTS.
>
>    What is the rationale for not allowing POINT's in INTERSECTS?

It is redundant with CONTAINS and iirc some people found INTERSECTS
decaying to CONTAINS a pain to implement...

> 2) The text says
>
>      A query with MAXREC=0 can be used with a simple query
>      (e.g. SELECT * FROM some_table) to extract and examine the
>      VOTable metadata (assuming FORMAT=votable). Note: in this version
>      of TAP, this is the only mechanism to learn some of the detailed
>      metadata, such as coordinate systems used.
>
>    I thought that TAP_SCHEMA.columns has all of that metadata?

There is no coordinate system metadata in the tap_schema.

> 3) I would really like to add a requirement that TAP/async jobs run
>    immediately if the parameter PHASE=RUN is passed during the initial
>    submission.  As I understand it, this was always intended to be
>    true, but was never specified.  I can work on the text if needed.

If this behaviour is specified in UWS-1.1 then it is the case already.
If not, then I don't think TAP is the place to do this... we could
clarify this point, but restating things from other specs usually only
leads to confusion.





-- 
Patrick Dowler
Canadian Astronomy Data Centre
Victoria, BC, Canada