Simple Image Access Protocol specification V1.0: Request for Comments

This document will act as RFC centre for the Simple Image Access Protocol specification Proposed Recommendation v1.1.

Review period: 2009 May 25 – 2009 June 22

In order to add a comment to the document, please edit this page and add your comment to the list below (include your WikiName so authors can contact you for further information). When the author(s) of the document have considered the comment, they will provide a response after the comment. Please be aware that SIAP V1 has been a de facto standard for some time so suggestions for change might be deferred to SIAP V2.

Discussions about any of the comments or responses should be conducted on the DAL mailing list, dal@ivoa.net.

Comments from the community

• Sample comment by JoeBloggs
  • Response (by AloysiusBickerstaffe)

* comment by PatrickDowler

The examples for error documents (eg end of section 4) use VOTable 1.1 or earlier directly embedded text; maybe clarify that this is VOTable version dependent; the reference is to the latest VOTable spec.

* comment by PatrickDowler

Spectral Bandpass metadata: The response should have a FIELD with ucd=VOX:BandPass_Unit. Why not just use the unit attribute in the FIELD(s) describing the values? I think this is the only place in the VO with this non-standard unit handling. Impact: this field is not required so removing it won't make services non-compliant; it may break applications that literally interpret the SIA spec and do not consider the VOTable spec fully.

* comment by PatrickDowler

FIELD vs PARAM: for any of the "should have a FIELD with..." is it a valid (equivalent) interpretation to use a PARAM instead if the value is constant? This is service-specific, but applicable to many of the recommended FIELDs, which may be constant. Impact: If this was explicitly allowed (or document just clarified that it is allowed) this gives services more freedom to reduce the size of the output VOTable but would not effect compliance of existing services; it would require applications or VOTable-reading libraries to be more flexible (e.g. correct) in their treatment of FIELD/PARAM.

Comments from the TCG during the normal RFC period (starting 25/05/2009)

Applications (Tom McGlynn, Mark Taylor)

Data Access Layer (Keith Noddle, Jesus Salgado)

Data Model (Mireille Louys, AnitaRichards)

Grid&Web Sevices (Matthew Graham, Paul Harrison)

Registry (Ray Plante, Aurelien Stebe)

Semantics (Sebastien Derriere, Norman Gray)

VOEvent (Rob Seaman, Alasdair Allan)

VO Query Language (Pedro Osuna, Yuji Shirasaki)

VOTable (François Ochsenbein)

Standard and Processes (Francoise Genova)

Astro RG (Masatoshi Ohishi)

Data Curation & Preservation (Bob Hanisch)

Theory (Herve Wozniak, Claudio Gheller)

TCG (ChristopheArviset, Severin Gaudet)