Minutes MWG 2003-09-25

[Ray Plante]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Tony Linde wrote:
> I am absolutely certain that there was no agreement to use ADQL for registry
> queries at Cambridge; that makes no sense to me but I'm happy to be educated
> :)

Slide 2 of Keith's planary presentation at Cambridge
(http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpMay2003ResReg/RWP04plenaryPresentation.pdf)
entitled "Accomplishments" has the bullet:  "Agreed to adopt VOQL once 
available".  

ADQL was not a term in the general VOQL WG parlance at that time; 
nevertheless, this is what the statement in the minutes refers to.  

In my recollection, the motivation for this starts with the realization 
that ADQL is meant for querying VO databases.  A registry is a database.  
The queries that the database will have to handle have the same 
difficulties that queries to catalogs will have (e.g. handling coverage 
constraints).  Thus, it makes sense to use the same query language.  

I'm not sure if ADQL will be sufficiently "available" for our IVOA demos,
so we may see some short term variation in this arena.  That has benefits
for prototyping purposes.

cheers,
Ray