Collaborative Page for the Table Access Protocol (TAP)

The Table Access Protocol (TAP) is a second generation DAL interface being developed to provide a general access mechanism for tabular data, including but not limited to astronomical catalogs. TAP is part of the DAL family of data access interfaces.

To register TAP services refer to the TAP VOResource extension REC (currently in TAPRegExt-1.0, Recommendation as of 27 August 2012).

Current TAP Recommendation

Current REC for the Table Access Protocol is TAP-1.1, approved on 27 September 2019.

Previous REC:

• TAP-1.0, 27 March 2010

For a full overview of the various TAP documents, not only Recommendations, refer to the IVOA Document Repository.

Active TAP pages & development

"-Next" page & Errata pages

• TAP-1.1 Next page to collect proposed features/changes for revisions 1.2+
• TAP-1.1 Errata page to propose and list Errata related to v1.1 Recommendation

Volute SVN document source

The TAP document source (uses ivoatex) can be found in the volute repo (projects/dal/TAP), e.g. svn checkout https://volute.g-vo.org/svn/trunk/projects/dal/TAP

Previous TAP pages & developmet

"-Next" & Errata pages

• TAP-1.0-Next page to collect proposed features and notes while developing the next revision (v1.1) of the specification.
• TAP-1_0-Errata page, instead, collects the Errata status for version 1.0 of the recommendation.

TAP Request for Comments (RFC) pages

• TAP-1.1 RFC
• TAP-1.0 RFC

TAP-Related Working Drafts

PQL V0.2 - Current PQL (Parameter Query) Working Draft (2009-05-20)

Earlier TAP working documents

TAP V1.0 - TAP Working Draft (2009-06-07)

TAP V0.5 - TAP Working Draft (2009-05-16)

TAP V0.42 - TAP Working Draft (2009-04-20)

TAP V0.41 - TAP Working Draft (2009-03-17)

TAP V0.4 - TAP Working Draft (February 2009)

PQL V0.1 - Proposed Parameterised Query Language Working Draft (February 2009)

DAL2 Architecture draft - Architecture and standard service profile for the DAL2 familiy of services (draft fall 2008)

TAP V0.31 - TAP Working Draft following Baltimore interop (November 2008)

TAP V0.31 Restructuring - Restructuring suggestions for TAP V0.31 draft

TAP V0.3 - TAP Draft as presented at Baltimore Interop

Other Related Documents

Scope and Role of the TAP Parameter Query (May 2009)

TAP/Param V0.2 - TAP/Param draft (includes TAP/Param functionality). This is based upon the discussions from the tiger team meeting held at JHU in November 2007 (JHU November 2007), as well as follow-on discussions regarding VOSpace integration, multi-region queries, and other topics.

TAP/QL V0.1 - TAP/QL Draft document focused on processing ADQL queries, synchronous and asynchronous execution, integration with other IVOA services and metadata provision using VOSI constructs.

TAP-Related Software

Server-side Tools

• CDS UWS Library - A library for server-side implementation of UWS (Download: http://saada.u-strasbg.fr/uwstuto/)
• DaCHS -- GAVO's data center helper suite is an integrated VO server also speaking TAP in ADQL. The ADQL library used will be available shortly from the DaCHS libraries page (complain if it's not).
• pgSphere - Spherical data type, operators and functions for PostgreSQL

• TOPCAT - The GUI tool TOPCAT includes a TAP Load Dialog
• STILTS - The command-line tool STILTS provides commands tapquery and tapresume
• TAPsh - TAP command-line tool/shell

TAP related IVOA Notes

• TAP-draft.pdf ( IVOA Note Authors: Aurélien Stébé, Kona Andrews, Guy Rixon, Iñaki Ortiz)
• TAP-Analysis.pdf ( IVOA Note Author: D.Tody)

TAP Meetings

• TAP planning meeting (JHU November 2007).
• TAP pages from IVOA Trieste (Trieste May 2008).