IVOA Roadmap for 2017A
This outlines the roadmap for development activities by the various IVOA working and interest groups in 2017 between the Shanghai and Santiago Interops.
Registry Interfaces 1.1, which in particular lets
RegTAP operators
register their services as registries (registration as TAP services with
RegTAP data in them, of course, can continue). That, however, builds on
the Discovering Dependent Resources note, so that would probably have to
be endorsed before RI 1.1 can actually become REC.
VOResource 1.1: Should go to RFC in the next few weeks. We are still
soliciting takeup of the new features. To make this more attractive,
the
RofR will investigate installing the new schema so registries
already using new features do not become invalid.
RegTAP 1.1: This puts new VOResource 1.1 features into
RegTAP. We have
first implementations of a proposed extension of the schema. A working
draft should be published July-ish.
Discovering Dependent Resources: This is a proposed endorsed note trying
to solve the problem of properly discovering data collections that are
published through other services, the prime use case so far being TAP
tables. The central concept here are auxiliary capabilities,
essentially saying "this data can be accessed via TAP/SIAP/whatever in a
services with the following access URL". There is some takeup of the
proposed scheme, and TOPCAT already supports discovery through it. To
make it a valid replacement for current workarounds (i.e.,
GloTS), more
takeup is necessary; various registry operators have pledged to work
towards it.
Standards records: We will continue to work with the chairs of the other
IVOA working groups to ensure that they register their standards as
envisioned by
StandardsRegExt (cf.
WriteAStandardsRecord).
TAPRegExt 1.1 will be kept in lockstep with TAP 1.1.
Maintenance: We will keep making sure the registry system runs; in
particular, the anomalies diagnosed by the ESA registry have been
diagnosed and, where there is a potential for later functionality
problems, will be addressed in the coming months.
Follow-up of the Document Standards V2.0: real-life adjustment of the standardisation, endorsed notes and errata processes.