Requirements and Use Cases for New Registry Search Interface

This page aims to capture requirements and use cases for a new (post-RI v1.0) registry search interface.

The RI v1.0 spec provides two interfaces for searching: one is a required ADQL-based interface and the other is an optional XQuery-based query. Both use SOAP. Since a searchable registry is only required to support the ADQL interface, this is the one that applications would prefer to be interoperable across registries. These interfaces, and particularly the ADQL interface, have following disadvantages:

• They are the only remaining recommended IVOA service interface based on SOAP. Because of the complexities introduced by SOAP and WSDLs for both providers and clients, our community has evolved to prefer RESTful interfaces.
• It relies on an old version of ADQL (v1.0) that itself never made it as an IVOA Recommendation.
• The ADQL interface returns either full VOResource records (some of which can be memory-bustingly large) or just their identifiers; most applications only want a few pieces of information from the VOResource records

This effort is motivated to address these problems by providing a searchable interface that is simpler and scriptable.

Use Cases

Here we list some sample queries we would like to be able to support.

Requirements

Here we list any functional and technical requirements (some deriving from the above use cases).

• the interface should be REST-like based primarily on HTTP Get.

Implementation Recommendations

Here we collect ideas for implementations that do not necessarily derive from requirements.