SSAP clients for theoretical spectra

[Carlos Rodrigo Blanco]

Hi

We have the same problem that you have. Here at LAEFF we 
have developed some services for theoretical spectra using 
TSAP (included as an appendix as a use case of SSAP). 
Some of them are available since some years ago, some 
others only months ago. You can take a look at some of them 
through VOSpec, through our web interface 
(http://laeff.inta.es/svo/theory/db2vo/html), via the TSAP 
interface that Miguel Cerviño talked about 
(http://www.laeff.inta.es/projects/svo/theory/tsap/) or 
directly asking for the format=metadata url.

The problems are:

- Only VOSpec has an interface to access those models.

- At a registry level the only way to register these 
services is a SSAP services. This mean that applications 
will query the services by position/object name and the 
services will never ask annything useful. There's no way to 
register them as TSAP, meaning that, even though the service 
conformes with SSAP specification, it does not answers 
to position queries and it needs a previous format=metadata 
query for finding the query parameters.

I thing that this lack of a proper way to register 
theoretical spectra services is very important. It makes 
these services almost invisible to the applications (as they 
wouldn't know how to find which ones are available). And 
maybe that is the reason why most application developers 
haven't felt the need to implement a way to access 
theoretical spectra services.

I'm really interested in any discusion about this subject.

Carlos Rodrigo

> To all architects and developers of SSAP clients:
>
> within the GAVO (German VO) project we implemented the 
> simple spectra access protocol for synthetic spectra. 
> When I started testing our
> service I noticed that most of the client tools do not 
> support search for theoretical spectra but only query by 
> position and time. So my question to the applications 
> working group: Are there any plans or on-going discussions 
> about including theoretical spectra? 
> Or any client software I do not know yet? (The only one I 
> know dealing  with parameters for theoretical spectra is 
> VOSpec.) 
>
> Otherwise I suggest to take this aspect into account for 
> further development.
>
> The base url of our SSAP service is:
> 
http://vo.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/ssatr-0.01/ssatr?request=queryData&
> To get an impression what parameters theoretical spectra 
> would typically  use, you can look at our browser based 
> interface (or contact me directly).
>
> http://vo.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/ssatr-0.01/TrSpectra.jsp
>
> (This service is supposed to comply with SSAP version 
> 1.02. If you find anything non-conforming, please let me 
> know. ) 
>
> Best regards,
> Ulrike Stampa, GAVO
>