TAP VOResource Extension Schema

Contents

Towards a Working Draft (2011-01-11)

There's a first draft of TAPRegExt up on http://vo.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/docs/TAPRegExt-20110120.html. Please comment.

The StandardKeyEnumeration mentioned in the draft text is forthcoming.

You can check out the source of the document at http://svn.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/svn/gavo/tapregext/. If you want read/write access to that repository, contact MarkusDemleitner.

Concepts to Include

The following concepts should be captured within TAP capabilities (much of it based on grepping the UWS and TAP specs for "may" and "should"):

• List of data models exposed -- as URIs, e.g., the ObsCore model: ivo://ivoa.net/std/ObsCore
• List of query languages supported -- these should be well-known strings as used in LANG, e.g. ADQL, ADQL-2.0, etc. They should contain a human-readable description (as element content?). We should recommend a convention for SQL in the spirit of "SQL-Postgres", "SQL-MySQL", etc.
• List of output formats -- specified with required MIME and optional shorthand. Again, a human-readable description (as element content?) would be nice.

The Upload Problem and VOSpace

From Pat's summary of the Nara discussion:

Controlled vocabulary for well know protocols - I would suggest the protocol scheme in lower case as that is common usage, ivo URI for protocols described in the registry - eg vos.

For vos URI support, we also need to specify if the service can perform authentication, but that is already specified when a service specifies the endpoint for the associated CDP service which would be required, so in my opinion one can just say they support "vos" (via the URI) and that means unauthenticated; if the service also has a supporting CDP then they can do authenticated (CDP spec says explicitly how to do this - maybe we should at least explicitly refer to the CDP spec section)

Things we'd probably not want in the capability

• Extended capabilities -- if they exist, create another capability element
• format of table names: name vs. schema.name vs. cat.schema.name -- since table names are delivered in qualified form, this is irrelevant for clients
• VOSI support -- this can be inferred from elsewhere in the registry record
• Passing on the RUNID -- do people need to know this from the registry?
• Further tables in TAP_SCHEMA -- can be taken from elsewhere in the registry record

Things deferred at Nara

• List of settable parameters (probably open-ended as key-value pairs; for limits and such, absence would mean "unlimited", max==default would mean "changing not supported"):
• Server settings
  • default/maximum retention period (=destruction time-creation time)
  • default/maximum run time
  • default/maximum row limit
  • uploadRowLimit uploadByteLimit
  • maybe quoteMethod -- how does the service come up with a quote: never, always artificial value, based on a query plan, based on the length of an input queue,...
• List of user defined functions -- with name, arguments (name, type, description), return type, and a short, human-readable documentation (does plain text suffice?)