Discovering Data Collections Within Services Note version 1.0

[Walter Landry]

Markus Demleitner <msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> I have just published a note on Discovering Data Collections Within
> Services in the IVOA document repository --
> http://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/DataCollect
> 
> What this is about, in brief: How do VO users find all the TAP tables
> we have out there, e.g., in VizieR or at IRSA or all those other
> wonderful data centers?  This particular rabbit hole goes a bit
> deeper, but the TAP issue is the most pressing use case.

As I understand this proposal, this enables linking data collections
to TAP services?  That is something that we wanted to do for a while,
so this is a welcome proposal.

With that said, I do like the GloTS method which actually crawls
TAP_SCHEMA.  That way there is a single, canonical place to put all of
the information.  But it is specific to TAP, and TAP is a non-trivial
thing to implement.

Cheers,
Walter Landry