VOSpace 2.0 Proposed Recommendation: Request for Comments

This document will act as RFC centre for the IVOA VOSpace 2.0 Proposed Recommendation. The latest version of the specification (02-Dec-2011) can be found at:

• IVOA VOSpace V2.00 Proposed Recommendation

VOSpace is the IVOA interface to distributed storage. This specification presents the first RESTful version of the interface, which is functionally equivalent to the SOAP-based VOSpace 1.15 specification . Note that all prior VOSpace (1.x) clients will not work with this new version of the interface.

Reference Interoperable Implementations

The following are known implementations of VOSpace 2.0:

• CADC - the source code is available at: http://code.google.com/p/opencadc/source/checkout
• VAO - the source code is available via the VAO SVN repository: svn+ssh://usvao-svn@svn.usvao.org/usvao/prototype/vospace/trunk/vospace-2.0/java/merged
• CDS - information available here : http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/resources/doku.php?id=vospace

Implementations Validators

(If any, indicate here the links to Implementations Validators)

RFC Review Period: 20-May-2012 to 22-Jun-2012

TCG Review Period: TCG_start_date - TCG_end_date

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Comments from the IVOA Community during RFC period: 20-May-2012 to 22-Jun-2012

In order to add a comment to the document, please edit this page and add your comment to the list below in the format used for the example (include your Wiki Name so that authors can contact you for further information). When the author(s) of the document have considered the comment, they will provide a response after the comment.

Additional discussion about any of the comments or responses can be conducted on the GWS VOSpace mailing list (vospace@ivoa.net). However, please be sure to enter your initial comments here for full consideration in any future revisions of this document

• Sample comment by WikiName
  • Response (by WikiName)

Comment by NormanGray

Sect.2 mentions that VOSpace URIs may have fragments, and illustrates how a fragment is literally copied into the retrieval URL from the vos: URL. However this is the only mention of 'fragment' in the document. If the intention is that the VOSpace spec regards the path+query+fragment as opaque, then it would be useful to state this explicitly in Sect.2. Given the potential problems with fragments (see Urbana TCG slides and draft uri-fragments note) it might be useful to do one of the following:

• forbid fragments in VOSpace URIs;
• require that any # characters in a VOSpace URI are encoded when being transformed into a retrieval URL; or
• specify that any fragment is removed as part of the process of transforming the VOSpace URI into the retrieval URI, on the grounds that the fragment will (or at least should) be automatically removed, in passing, by the library which does the HTTP retrieval.

Editorial remark: the HTML version is served with MIME type text/html; charset=UTF-8 (the meta@http-equiv element in the HTML header is ignored), but the content is ISO-8859-1, and there are two soft hyphens (0xad) in the Sect 2 example identifier which appear wrongly in a browser which pays attention to the MIME type.

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