IVOA-science in Softid

[Tamara Civera]

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you Markus and Mark for your contributions and discussions on 
client identification and SoftID. In fact, this is a topic I suggested 
and included in the 2025B roadmap of the Operations group for this 
semester, based on the discussions we had during the last IVOA 
interoperability meeting, and which I wanted to start working on now. My 
intention was to remind the community about the existing note on 
User-Agent and server usage, and to see whether any updates to the note 
might be needed, so thank you again for moving it forward.

Regarding your idea of starting to use 'IVOA-science' or something 
similar in the User-Agent, I think it’s a very good approach for exactly 
the reasons you both mentioned. From my perspective as a data provider, 
in our case it can help improve statistics and better distinguish VO 
usage from other traffic, making it easier to identify VO clients. On 
whether to use 'science' or 'client', I don’t have a strong opinion. 
Another suggestion could be something like 'IVOA-datainquiry', although 
honestly, I’m still not fully convinced either way.

I would also mention that a few weeks ago I updated the information on 
the SoftID web page (https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SoftID). 
So I would like to use this discussion to encourage clients and data 
providers to update the page with the "User-Agent" and/or "Server" 
header information they are currently using.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the Operations group is fully 
available to provide any support or assistance needed on this topic. 
Please let us know if there is any way we can help, and I would also 
like to encourage you to extend this discussion to the Ops mailing list.

Best regards and thanks,

Tamara Civera

El 8/1/26 a las 18:08, Markus Demleitner via apps escribió:
> 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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/mbt/releases/topcat/pre/topcat-full_softid.jar__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Sc_zzpvoRnjsF2neqG9Q0jVTg7QvSDfYwcya5y9EGYtVXezuDXjgZxXesZpEGkWqOMLXiDj10HU$  
> Thanks a lot!  And also thanks for your comment
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/ivoa/softid/pull/1*pullrequestreview-3631477934__;Iw!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Sc_zzpvoRnjsF2neqG9Q0jVTg7QvSDfYwcya5y9EGYtVXezuDXjgZxXesZpEGkWqOMLX5UiV65A$ 
> >,
> 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
>
-- 
Tamara Civera Lorenzo
Scientific Database Engineer / IVOA Ops vice-chair
Logotipo CEFCA 	*Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón*

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