Status Report of the VOQL WG

                                 January 29, 2004
                                 Masatoshi Ohishi (NAOJ)

In the interopersbility meeting in Strasbourg, the WG
agreed to split our previous working document (VOQL-0.5)
into two parts: ADQL and SkyQL. Wil O'Mullane of JHU worked
very hard to incoorporate several important comments presented
at the interoperability meeting into two documents. These
documents were put to the IVOA TWiKi page, then enthusiastic
debates were observed.

Now the WG has two working documents:
ADQL-0.7.1 and SkyNodeInterface-0.6

The WG has not approved any proposed Recommendations, and the
group had no "Notes".

Some points were raised by Tony Linde, and discussion were made 
in the group with points, for example, necessity of the Portal, 
intention of the SkyNode interface, etc. on SkyNode in our working 
document (SkyNodeInterface), and difference between ADQL and SkyQL, 
newly defined functions which are not contained in SQL (e.g., 
REGION) (on ADQL and SkyQL). It should be noted that SkyQL is
designed as a human-friendly query language whereas ADQL as
a language for communications between machines, and that ADQL
is an XMLed version of SkyQL. I feel that it would be possible
to approve two working documents after some additional discussions
within the group.

The group had another debate on the physical protocol for 
communications between machines -- is it appropriate to use SOAP
or HTTP GET/SEND ? The majority supports to use the SOAP, however,
it is an important issue for the IVOA which protocols we should
use to interconnect VOs in the world. It would be approoriate
to continue the discussion not only in the VOQL WG but in other
WGs.

Finally I would like to raise another point: authorship of our
working documents, proposed recommendations, and IVOA recommen-
dations. In working documents, those who drafted the documents
are the authours, and WG chair and other key person(s) could be
the editors. Do we keep the same authourship / editorship in
proposed recommendations and IVOA recommendations ? One possibility
would that the relevant WG / IVOA becomes the author for proposed
recommendations and IVOA recommendations, respectively. IVOA
executive committee is requested to discuss on this issue.