On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Gerard wrote:
> parameters are supported. Is there anything in TSAP that is essentially
> different from this?
TSAP was essentially a prototype for the current SSAP for theory data; it just needs to be updated. It is still ahead of the other apps in this area though. The general problem here is not theory data specifically, but that a fully general application should be able to support service specific parameters, and dynamically query these and permit the user to specify arbitrary queries. This allows a standard mechanism to be extended to do many things, including (but not limited to) control params for a theoretical model.
> The problem is I think that clients are in general not yet able to use this
> information.
Yes, of course.
> In the end every SSA service should respond to format=metadata with the
> parameters they support and clients should (eventually) make use of this
> information to at least not send positional queries to services that do not
> support them, and once all metadata is there (getCapabilities will hopefully
> use the requirements form this discussion) GUIs can be generated that
> capture also more generic queries.
Yes. I am sure this will be the case soon, but it does not hurt to encourage this, and bug those responsible for the major apps to support this capability.