The project is to distribute VizieR catalogues pertaining to the Solar System and exoplanets as an EPN-TAP service, so as to make them visible during a thematic search on the VESPA portal.
This project is a milestone in EPN-2024 (MS25, July 2021).
Difficulties include:
- VizieR has a TAP interface but relies on the Vollt server, which is not the reference server in VESPA (DaCHS). As Vollt has different support of ADQL than DaCHS, this requires adaptations both on the portal and on the server.
- VizieR also handles a different directory tree. Although the VizieR TAP server presents a specific page for the EPN-TAP service (B/planets/epn_core), this also needs be supported in the VESPA portal.
- Ingestion of new catalogues in VizieR relies on parsing associated README files provided by authors.
- Level of description of the catalogues of interest is non-uniform and variable. In some cases, they only contain observation tables; at best the data are available in a sub-directory, not always with a fits-formatting script. Of course there is no fixed RA-DEC location, except for exoplanets.
Still to do:
- Fixes on VizieR side, in particular equivalent of DaCHS' lower function (cds_lower)
- Related adaptations on the portal: cds_lower syntax
- support for value lists in this case, on portal side
- Check consistency with EPN-TAP2 doc (PR document, July 2021)
- Declare in local VESPA registry
- Register VizieR_planets in IVOA registry
- Improve catalogue description according to EPNCore rules - target_class at least should be identified for publication.
Docs:
MS25 document available here: MS25 - VizieR catalogues interface, study report