Hi All,
Before describing my comments on the subject, I have to apologize that I cannot attend today's telecon. I have a cold, so going back home to sleep early...
Here are my opinions on TAP metadata:
I don't agree that the interface should be mandatory for TAP service. We already have a path to register the metadata using the publishing registry, that is enough. Why we need another way to register the metadata ?
And if many complex operations are defined, it will become more difficult for service provider to imlement and maintain the service so that it correctly reacts to the query.
I don't like to have two paths to expose the service metadata.
2. TAP should have an access mechanism to query the table/column information.
SQL is an approriate language for that purpose. All the relation DB has such functionality. This should be a mandatory operation, since without these information it is impossible to write a correct SQL. VOTable is enough for retruned format. Tabular format is easy to use. Structure data is not easy to use and also not easy to define.
It is better that these information is accessible directly from a TAP service rather than from a registry. These inoformation is frequently refered by a client, so I am afraied the registry becomes very busy if such important information is centralized to the registry servcice.
Yuji SHIRASAKI. Received on 2007-03-08Z11:35:15