IVOA-science in Softid

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Colleagues,

On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 04:10:30PM +0000, Mark Taylor wrote:
> I've implemented it in prototype from the client side for topcat
> and stilts:
>
>   https://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/mbt/releases/topcat/pre/topcat-full_softid.jar

Thanks a lot!  And also thanks for your comment
<https://github.com/ivoa/softid/pull/1#pullrequestreview-3631477934>,
in particular this part:

> [Soft-id says:]
>> +The access was done to directly support a science case.  This explicitly
>> +includes education and training, in particular because we do not want to
>> +suggest that software used in such settings -- which plausibly is going
>> +to be the same as software used in pure research -- should be
>> +reconfigured for them.

And Mark says:

> I'm not sure about "to directly support a science case"; I'd
> suggest something a bit more woolly like "in support of science
> usage" or "in the context of science usage".  I think the main
> target here is to differentiate clients that understand the
> VO/astronomy services they are engaging with from those that are
> just hitting anything they can find.  From a practical point of
> view, at least for clients like topcat and stilts, it's not likely
> to be feasible to get them to present different user-agent headers
> on the basis of the user intention for particular requests, only on
> the basis of the tools in use.
>
> Given that I'm wondering if there's a different term than "science"
> that should be used here, but I don't have great suggestions.
> IVOA-voclient or just IVOA-client maybe?

Well... I'm not a fan of "client" at all because validators are
clients, too.  But on re-reading my original text, I don't like the
part about "support a science case.  And then there's these other
purposes, too, and anyway clients shouldn't need to guess whether
something is a dry run or the real thing."  If it's not (only)
distilled rocket science, we shouldn't use a term that might be
understood in this way.

I think what I want to convey is: "This is VO software intended for
the end user (rather than infrastructure)" (and I think I'd like to
fix the explanation to better express that, too).

So, perhaps VO-user is less grandiose?  But then "user" is one of
these words like "resource" that has come to mean far too many
things.  Soooo... If some nice word more nearly expressing this
"end-user query" concept just crossed your mind: By all means speak
up.

Thanks,

           Markus