NExScI TAP release

[Berriman, Graham (Bruce)]

NExScI has released Version 1.0 of the source code for nexsciTAP, a Python-based server that complies with the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) Table Access Protocol (TAP). The protocol defines a web service for searching tables in relational databases using the Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL), a dialect of SQL optimized for astronomical spatial queries. nexsciTAP translates ADQL into the SQL for the local DBMS (including the spatial search constructs) then uses off-the-shelf Python DB-API 2.0 implementations to retrieve the data. The distribution includes spatial indexing code that does not require any special augmentation to the local DBMS code, thereby allowing it to work with any DBMS engine. Version1.0 includes connections to Oracle and SQLite3. The code base is compact. It consists of 10 KLOC of Python, and 15 KLOC of spatial indexing code written in C and deployed as a Python binary extension package. Both HTM and HEALPix spatial index tesselations are supported. nexsciTAP underpins queries to the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) and the NEID archive. Both synchronous and asynchronous queries for public data have been tested with three commonly used TAP clients: PyVO, TAPPlus (TAP+) and TOPCAT as well as with shell scripts using wget. The code is available at https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/nexsciTAP (BSD 3-clause license) and the documentation at https://caltech-ipac.github.io/nexsciTAP/.

Future releases will include support for PostgreSQL and continuous integration.

We invite suggestions for upgrades and for contributions.

Cheers

Bruce


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Bruce Berriman
Scientist
Caltech/IPAC




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