Software Identification

This page collects resources related to activities of the Operations Iterest Group concerning identification in client/server interactions.

History

This topic was kicked off by discussions at Interops (Mark in College Park, Markus in Groningen). It concerns recommendations for best practice in use of the HTTP User-Agent and Server headers so that clients (especially "operational-mode" clients such as validators) and servers can be identified by other software they are interacting with. Recommendations for client identification were initially codified on the UserAgentUsage page.

Status:

This is now a published IVOA Note: NOTE-softid-1.0.

Takeup

This section lists examples of client and server headers written by some known VO components, that may or may not follow the SoftID recommendations. Please note the examples are representative, not necessarily verbatim copies of what these components will report.

If you can add entries to this list, please do. You can add as much information as seems relevant, e.g. dates or versions for which certain header values apply (where it's not obvious from the context).

Client software (User-Agent header)

• STILTS validation tools (taplint, datalinklint)
  • User-Agent: STILTS/3.4 (IVOA-validate) Java/1.8.0_181 (earlier versions, following earlier softid draft)
  • User-Agent: STILTS/3.4-1+ (IVOA-test) Java/1.8.0_181 (later versions, following published Note-softid-1.0)
• STILTS general query tools (tapquery, cone)
  • User-Agent: STILTS/3.4 Java/1.8.0_181
• TOPCAT
  • User-Agent: TOPCAT/4.8 Java/1.8.0_181
• GloTS
  • User-Agent: GloTS-harvester (IVOA-copy) DaCHS/{version}
• GAVO RegTAP
  • User-Agent: GAVO-RegTAP-harvester (IVOA-copy) DaCHS/{version}

Server software (Server header)

• DaCHS over twisted:
  • Server: DaCHS/{version} twistedWeb/{version}