RI1 and regTAP

[Ray Plante]

FYI: moving this this thread to the list:

On Wed, 4 Dec 2013, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Hi Ray,
> 
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 03:48:35PM -0600, Ray Plante wrote:
> > PS: I'm doing an experiment in trying to support the RI1-ADQL 
> > interface against the regtap database which is getting me ever more 
> > familiar with the regtap schema.  The ultimate challenge is including 
> > constraints on *multiple* res_detail utypes.  Can you say self-joins?  
> 
> Well, if we figure out cases where we reasonably need to do such
> things, that's probably an indication that these things should leave
> res_details -- figuring out design weaknesses like this is why I'm
> urging people to write clients of this, and this is why we're working
> on WIRR.
> 
> What's the use case you have for constraining several details?
> 
> Cheers,
>        Markus

At the moment, my working use case is just supporting all the queries 
we were supporting (or trying to) before with RI1.  My motivation is 
that if I can get this working, then our new registry will (hopefully) 
now properly support the RI1 ADQL interface.

I think, though, the real-world use case covers queries similar to the 
one Mark documented on the list recently on the list (when he noticed 
a problem with the way he was doing his registry query from Topcat).  
I haven't actually studied that particular case against the regTAP 
schema in detail yet (because I haven't yet given up on my current 
experiment), but I don't think it runs into this res_detail issue (as 
our previously documented examples show).

However, I'll note that there looks to be a similar issue with 
res_roles, though I haven't gotten to this issue yet in my current 
work.  That is, what if in your query you want to constrain more than 
one different type of role (e.g. publisher and creator)?

I'll also note I do *not* consider supporting RI1 via the regTAP 
schema as important for evaluating regTAP.  I thought it would be 
worth sharing my experience in as far as it identifies tricky queries 
that normal regTAP users might encounter.  I'll try to post some of 
these queries (either here on the list or on the Twiki where we have 
other examples).

cheers,
Ray