An updated specification for the legacy cone search protocol has
been prepared and is now an IVOA Proposed Recommendation. A 1-month
Request For Comments period has been initiated, with the goal of
advancing Simple Cone Search to an IVOA Recommendation.
The Simple Cone Search (SCS) protocol has been in use for several years now, with hundreds of implementations. The intention of promoting SCS to a Recommendation is to promote this already widely adopted defacto standard catalog access protocol to a formal IVOA standard, both to document this widely-used protocol, and to allow it to be managed via the IVOA standards process.
Since SCS is already widely implemented, our intention here is not to further refine the current standard, but to produce a specification which is backwards compatible with the existing implementations. Comments both on the merits of this goal, and on the details of the draft specification, are welcome.
Further refinement and extension of the SCS specification, e.g., to add new features in a backwards-compatible fashion, is possible in a V1.1 or greater version of the protocol. Specification of a revision of the protocol of this type is possible once the current SCS protocol is finalized. In the longer term, the general Table Access Protocol (TAP), currently being specified by a joint effort of the VOQL and DAL working groups, is expected to provide much more advanced capabilities.
A 1-month Request For Comments period on the draft SCS V1.0 specification has therefore been initiated. Please review the specification, and post any comments both to the RFC page at
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ConeSearchV10RFC
as well as to the DAL WG mailing list (dal-at-ivoa.net). The most recent version of the specification can be found at
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/PR/DAL/ConeSearch-20060908.html
Please submit any comments by 27 April 2007. Thanks in advance for your contributions.
Doug Tody
Chair, IVOA Data Access Layer Working Group
Received on 2007-03-28Z06:06:26