[Ops] taplint clinic

[Mark Taylor]

Dear all,

the IVOA Operations Interest Group, alongside the Data Access Layer
Working Group, is involved in an effort to improve standards
compliance of deployed IVOA services.

As one strand of this activity, I would be pleased to work with TAP
service developers and deployers to understand, and hopefully reduce,
any errors reported by the TAP service validation tool taplint.

Taplint (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/taplint.html)
is part of the STILTS package, developed and maintained by me.
It is the basis for most of the TAP service validation performed
by the central validation services run by e.g. ESAC/Euro-VO
(http://registry.euro-vo.org/evor/) and PADC/VO-Paris
(https://voparis-validation-reports.obspm.fr/validation/services).
Its output is quite detailed, but can be hard to understand, and
service providers might need a helping hand to make sense of it.

This message is an invitation to any TAP service operator or
software developer who is willing to try to improve the standards
compliance of their service but would like some assistance.
You may have run taplint but not understood some/all of the output,
or have seen taplint error reports on one of the validation
aggregation sites, or have no idea what taplint is.  I can help
you run it[*] and understand any error reports, and hopefully
improve the service, or maybe correct the validator, to stop 
them happening.

If you're interested, please email me.

Mark

[*] though it's pretty easy: just download 
    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/stilts.jar and then run 
    'java -jar stilts.jar taplint tapurl=http://example.org/tap'

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/