Question about registry support of general RESTful services.

[Paul Harrison]

On 2012-01 -04, at 21:23, Theresa Dower wrote:

> Is there anywhere in the IVOA standards docs that I've somehow missed for describing generic RESTful services? The ParamHTTP standard doesn’t quite fit for a lot of real-world cases. Beyond expanding queryTypes for ParamHTTP to include UPDATE/DELETE/ETC,  I also mean some kind of  support for parameters that are XML or JSON blobs.  This is already described in a hodgepodge of specialized interfaces for VOSI, TAP, VOSpace, etc, but what about non-standard DataServices? I know I'm out of the loop on some generic registry stuff and may have missed something. If not, I’m beginning to see the need for a general extension for it.
>  
> --Theresa Dower


We ( Carlo Maria Zwölf, Franck Le Petit & myself) are working on a Parameter Description Language (PDL) http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpOct2011GWS/interopPune.pdf that could act as a meta description of a generic service and its parameters - the intention being to allow interoperability between various existing service descriptions e.g. WADL, WSDL by providing a description that could possibly be transformed into one of these descriptions for implementation purposes - in the first instance we will be providing an implementation that works with UWS.

UWS does provide some support for "parameters" that are XML or JSON blobs in that it does not prescribe the "Job definition language" (JDL) used to specify the input to the job - however, in general the level of granularity that is used to describe a parameter (i.e. is the JSON blob a single parameter, or are the properties specified within it parameters?) is crucial to achieving interoperability. The approach that we are trying to take with the parameter description language is to go for fine grained granularity so that each service will have a PDL and a transformation specification that will create the JDL. Services should be able to work out if they can sensibly use their output as input for another service by simply querying the PDL of the receiving service.

Regards
	Paul.

Dr. Paul Harrison
JBCA, Manchester University
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/jodrellbank



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