The Simple Spectral Access (SSA) protocol document is now an IVOA
Proposed Recommendation. A 1-month Request For Comments period
has been initiated, with the goal of advancing SSA to an IVOA
Recommendation.
Note that although early SSA implementations include a getCapabilities operation for returning service metadata, specification of this operation has proven more time-consuming than hoped due to multiple working groups being involved, and has been deferred to SSA V1.1, which is expected to follow in several months time. The V1.0 specification being reviewed here mentions getCapabilities (and getAvailability) but does not specify the contents of the metadata to be returned. As per agreements reached in Beijing, the older FORMAT=METADATA construct is specified instead. This will eventually be deprecated, but allows SSA V1.0 to go forward immediately while we continue work to specify these additional operations for V1.1.
A 1-month Request For Comments period on the draft SSA V1.0 specification has therefore been initiated. Please review the specification, and add any comments to the RFC page at
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SsaRFC
More extensive discussions should be directed to the DAL working group mailing list (dal-at-ivoa.net). The most recent version of the SSA specification can be found at
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/SSA.html
Please submit any comments by 2 July 2007. Thanks in advance for your contributions.
Doug Tody
Out-going Chair, IVOA Data Access Layer Working Group
Received on 2007-06-04Z19:30:12