RFC initiated for Simple Cone Search protocol

[Doug Tody]

An updated specification for the legacy cone search protocol has
been prepared and is now an IVOA Proposed Recommendation.  A 1-month
Request For Comments period has been initiated, with the goal of
advancing Simple Cone Search to an IVOA Recommendation.

The Simple Cone Search (SCS) protocol has been in use for several years
now, with hundreds of implementations.  The intention of promoting
SCS to a Recommendation is to promote this already widely adopted
defacto standard catalog access protocol to a formal IVOA standard,
both to document this widely-used protocol, and to allow it to be
managed via the IVOA standards process.

Since SCS is already widely implemented, our intention here is not to
further refine the current standard, but to produce a specification
which is backwards compatible with the existing implementations.
Comments both on the merits of this goal, and on the details of the
draft specification, are welcome.

Further refinement and extension of the SCS specification, e.g., to
add new features in a backwards-compatible fashion, is possible in a
V1.1 or greater version of the protocol.  Specification of a revision
of the protocol of this type is possible once the current SCS protocol
is finalized.  In the longer term, the general Table Access Protocol
(TAP), currently being specified by a joint effort of the VOQL and DAL
working groups, is expected to provide much more advanced capabilities.

A 1-month Request For Comments period on the draft SCS V1.0 specification
has therefore been initiated.  Please review the specification, and post
any comments both to the RFC page at

     http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ConeSearchV10RFC

as well as to the DAL WG mailing list (dal at ivoa.net).  The most recent
version of the specification can be found at

     http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/PR/DAL/ConeSearch-20060908.html

Please submit any comments by 27 April 2007.  Thanks in advance for
your contributions.

Doug Tody
Chair, IVOA Data Access Layer Working Group