RE: in place of Hervé(herve.wozniak at newb6.u-strasbg.fr)

[Gerard]

Dear Carlos
> 
> But we don't really understand, either, why the SimDB/SimDAP 
> iniciative is promoted to other IVOA groups as the "proposal 
> by the Theory Interest Group" when we, at this group, haven't 
> been able to really discuss it.
> 
SimDB is not "the proposal", it is "a" proposal. Actually they are two
proposals.
I do not understand this criticism (which it is). 
We have presented and discussed SNAP and SimDB/SimDAP in each and every
interop meeting.
Miguel and Patrizia have attended a workshop on SNAP in april 2007.
Patrizia has been more involved in this since SimDB is more her domain than
Miguel's.
Most work has happpened inside a "tiger team" that is true, and developments
have been 
slower than hoped. But Miguel can not have been unaware of the existence of
the project, 
whether under the name SNAP, or since recently SimDB+SimDAP. And the same
should be true for you.
Note that part of the reason for the split from SNAP->SimDB+SimDAP was so
that different people could be 
in charge of parts of the process, in this case Claudio and Rick pushing the
process further for SimDAP.


> The fact, as I see it, is that this group has been always the 
> "SNAP interest group", the "cosmological simulations interest 
> group" or the "big numerical simulations interest group". 
> It's not really a critizism, I think that we all saw it in 
> this way, both the people interested in that kind of 
> simulations and the people that were interested in other 
> questions. In fact, other things related to theoretical 
> models in the VO, like theoretical spectra models, were 
> discussed somewhere else with no interaction at all with this 
> group. Even at Cambridge, when Miguel asked about the group 
> interest in this things he was aswered with something like 
> "we are not really interested in that, if you are interested, 
> it is your work to promote and lead that subject".
> 
Carlos, this is a very incorrect, even unfair representation of what
happened. 
>From the very beginning of the TIG we have been open to all interested
parties to propose their projects. 
This is why at some point we had an effort to define use cases for example
to see what could be done.
At some point, one group decided, as outcome of a meeting in Cambridge, to
investigate a specification for simulations, N-body and related (mesh)
simulations. This was called SNAP.
In Victoria this was first proposed to the IVOA and we explicitly asked
relevant WG for suggestions how to proceed. This lead to a change in
direction, from a SIAP clone to an approach mirroring SSA, which includes
designing a data model on which the protocol can be based.
In the same meeting we asked whether there was interest in, or need for
other specifications, precisely because we did not want the TIG to restrict
itself to one type of theory only. In that same meeting, during discussions
on SSA, it became clear that that spec would explicitly take into accoutn
theory spectrsa. For example by not insisiting on spatial coordinates. Still
we asked whether people wanted other spec, but no one wanted to.

This question was repeated in all interops since then and until the interop
in Cambridge the answer remained no. 
This changed in Cambridge, when, after again asking for this, this time
there was interest to go beyond theory spectra. Particularly Miguel, who was
immediatly put in charge of investigating this further. This was not because
other people thought it uninteresting, but because Miguel, with his
background and interest was seen as the perfect person to push this further.
Similarly Franck LePetit was going to lead a project on semantics for
theory.


> Only recently this group has started to be interested in 
> other kind of theoretical problems that have been labeled as 
> "microsimulations" but biased by the original perspective 
> (and it's perfectly understable).
> 
What bias is there? I don't understand this.

> Actually, I don't really understand why we should work in a 
> unique idea or protocol. I think that it is as saying that 
> the VO should have only one protocol for observational data 
> and that SSAP, SIAP, ConeSearch, Skynode, TAP, etc should 
> work in converging to an only protocol.
> 
Sorry you are again completely misrepresenting the situation as I hope you
see from the previous comments..

> I just hope that this series of mails is the begining of some 
> useful discussion :-)
Well I hope the discussions can avoid misrepresentations such as the ones
you made.
I will give my comments on S3, but have been busy with other work to do so
already now.


Best regards

Gerard