IVOA Interoperability Meeting

Moscow, Russia, 18-20 September 2006

VO Query Language (VOQL) Sessions

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Open Plenary session

The Open Plenary session slides can be found here

VOQL-1 Session - Tuesday morning 11:00-12:30

Minutes of the session (notes by J. Salgado)

Future work for the VOQL group

The main idea in the new direction of the VOQL group is to sepaerate the language from the access. There has currently been an intermingling of specifications that were mixing the Language (ADQL) with the access (SkyNode). The impossibility to separate one from the other was leading to inconsistencies in both the language and the access.

To try to remove these incompatibilities, the VOQL group has decided to separate completely languag and access, and work consequently in the following three areas:

• VO Query Language Specificaion (VOQL)
• Table Access Protocol (TAP)
• SkyNode

The first two will be dealt by the VOQL group directly. The third one will be worked on, probably in relation to the TAP research. It is still not clear in which IVOA group this one should follow.

We have created a VOQL Technical Experts Group (VOQL-TEG) to deal with all the aforementioned issues, in the definition of the standards as well as in the construction of reference implementations, and/or tools necessary to widespread the VO Query Language and applied uses.

The VOQL-TEG will meet regularly (normally by teleconference) and the aoutcomes of the discussions within the group will be fed to the community periodically, to get proper feedback.

An e-mail distribution list will be created for the reduced group, and the mails will be archived as usual at the IVOA pages.

 

 

VOQL/DAL joint Session - Tuesday afternoon 16:00-17:30

In this session, Ray Plante presented the outcomes from an NVO meeting where they discussed on possible inputs for an eventual Table Access Protocol. A lot of commonalities and only a few of possible discrepancies where clearly shown with respect to the ideas shown in the VOQL-1 sesion (see the presentation) on the future Table Access Protocol.

Roadmap

It is not easy to predict at this stage the possible roadmap for the VOQL group, in view of the new structure and documents that the group will be preparing. The following, nevertheless, is an attempt to do so:

• Past time: 27 Jul 2006 change of chair
• Current time: Creation of VOQL-TEG
• Last quarter 2006: Work on stabilizing a VOQL specification and initiate the TAP
• China 2007 meeting: present atable VOQL version and first TAP version
• September interop meeting: Advance VOQL Spec to PR and present new TAP version

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