ADASS 2021 BoF TAP and the DMs

by Laurent Michel, LM (ObAS), François Bonnarel, FB (CDS), Judith Silverman, JS (Caltech), Mireille Louys, ML, (CDS), and Dave Morris, DM(ROE)

Introduction (retranscription)

The topic of this BoF can be seen as a bit odd in the context of ADASS.
I don’t know if you all closely follow the VO activities, do you?

Data modeling is a rather far from the ADASS topics.
And VO data modeling is very far these topics although they was an invited talk some years ago.
It is an obscure think we do not speak about out of the VO meetings
Data modeling is actually an activity rather achieved back stage.
An activity that is necessary to build nice cutting-edge services but it is usually not what we highlight at the end.

The situation for TAP regarding ADASS is similar at some point>
Let me tell you a little story.

There was long time ago, an TV advertisement where a guy was asking to his workmate,
“what is the brand of your washing machine”, the guy responded,” I don’t know ,we never speak about it with my wife since it never broke down”
It was a smart way to emphasis on the reliability of that brand.

We could tell the same story for TAP
TAP is the VO protocol for accessing relational data and used by many users in a transparent way.
We do need to talk about, we just run it.

We have 2 topics, which common point is to be somehow hidden and far from the conference thread.
But if we put them together the topic may become a little bit more relevant.

Data modeling is about building accurate data descriptions and accurate descriptions of the way it can be combined..
If we add some VO flavour we have to add an interoperability coating by saying "accurate description that can be shared by different data provider”

TAP is about retrieving tabular data in a standard way.
But our hope is that having TAP based services able to provide combination of tabular data with an accurate description might interest people a bit ahead from the VO standard definition.

This is not necessarily matter of defining some ORM patterns.
There are many intermediate situations where we can take advantage of data models without diving into a fully Object Oriented paradigm.

In this session, we will present what we can do, what we could do, what we could dream about and what we definitely cannot expect.

As a return, we hope to generate interest for the issue and to initiate discussions where relevant use cases will be put on the table.

The session is setup as thread that will be forked from time to time by presentations, given by ML, JS, FB, DM or myself and that will be focused on a particular aspect of the DM usage within a TAP context.

Please, feel free to interrupt this nice schedule at your convenience with questions or remarks.

Let’s start with telling a story, which will progressively drive use toward complex cases.