TAP-1.1 Authenticated Endponts Historical Discussion Summary

This page is meant to give an overall view of the discussion that led to the decision for authenticated endpoints in TAP-1.1. It is presented chronologically with links to mail threads involved and relevant session during the interops for the time span.

Chronology stops before the College Park interop, where DAL/GWS/Registry held a session and a splinter discussion to try to definitively settle the issue.

Chronological references overview

The start of the discussion is probably in this thread (DAL list) highlighting potential issues on capabilities and interfaces in TAP-1.1 when enumerating the services from the client perspective. (It also includes RegTAP query insights.)

The discussion was brought to the Santiago interop (~1 month later) in the GWS sessions. To solve the issues there, a splinter discussion took place. The outcome of the discussion was to create a specification, the UWSRegExt to hold standardId(s) for the sync/async resources in for protocols in general.

The UWSRegExt xsd was released on [[http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/grid/2018-February/002929.html][February 2018 (GWS mail thread)] and following mail threads in GWS (all with sunject "Home for the UWS Registry Extension") went on till a contribution in Registry session in Victoria interop (May 2018).

At Victoria it was pointed out that the UWSRegExt, as a Note, wouldn't be suited to be referenced by a full REC like TAP-1.1. Nonetheless, considering the content of the Note would then end up in some other specification, the deal was to go on and only add text in TAP-1.1 to make sure implementors didn't get confused.

However discussion went on on the mailing lists, like "Home for the UWS Registry Extension" threads and the "TAP 1.1, RegTAP 1.1, xsi:type" in Registry mailing list, plus the "DALI services" in VOSI and Registry appeared on the Apps, DAL, Registry and GWS lists. In the same time, July-September 2018, the "TAP-1.1 authentication" threads on DAL lists re-ignited the discussion on ho to properly solve this issue, and this is represented also on the TAP-1.1 RFC page.