TAP-1.1 Next

This topic collects proposals for modifications of the TAP-1.1 specification in order to improve the next revision of the specification.

Errata to the TAP-1.1 Recommendation can be found on the devoted TAP-1_1-Errata page.

Proposed Features

Modify here to give your input, than possibly alert the community (email, slack, ...).

Feature: User-managed tables

The goal is to enable users to create table, create index, drop table, and load data (only adding rows). Stretch goals: setting permissions (private, groups via GMS, or public), some other table maintenance ops like renaming tables and columns and modifying some table (tap_schema) metadata. When digging into the details, there are lots of things that could be done where it seems like effort >> value, so tha hard part is drawing trhe line of what is in the stds and what is not.

The goal in CANFAR was to support projects that were creating astronomical catalogues so mostly bulk loading of content and that's what the CANFAR youcat service does now. The features could also support users managing their own tables in a more persistent fashion than we have with TAP upload: create a server-side table once, do various queries/joins with other tables over a period of time, and maybe drop it later. I'm sure there are other useful things one could do.

PatrickDowler gave a presentation in College Park (https://wiki.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpNov2018DAL/tap-youcat.pdf)

The REST API docs for our youcat service are here: https://ws-cadc.canfar.net/youcat/ but will be added below in a more simplified form.