WebDAV SEARCH

[Andreas Wicenec]

On 15.06.2004, at 18:35, Wil O'Mullane wrote:

>
> Wel the basic grammer presented is more primitive than ADQL - and the  
> group is calling for more features in ADQL. It is interestingly based  
> on SQL.
> They do not define XSD  they use DTD.
>

You are right the grammer is more primitive, but it is less the grammer  
I'm interested in than the way they are putting this grammer in place:  
They are using a container which can contain whatever grammer you like  
(including ADQL). In addition they propose a mechanism of how to  
negotiate which grammer the server supports. Some people around that  
group also proposed to change completely to XPATH2.0 and/or XQUERY.

> They deal more with the mechanics - I prefer to leat SOAP handle that.
> Its based on WebDAV which is very HTML document oriented with Locking  
> editing
> etc. (it is for distributed authoring)
>

There is already an initiative under way to pack this whole thing into  
SOAP

> We would still need our own grammer - this could be another transport  
> mechanism
> but it is basically put either simple puts or with XML the return is  
> always XML.
> So this is a primitive less well defined type of SOAP.
>
> In short I do not see a lot for us here - although it confirms SQL as  
> a starting chice for the language :)
>

The most interesting point though is that WebDAV as such is already  
very well supported: Windows, KDE, Gnome and MacOSX allow to connect  
and communicate with WebDAV servers. Oracle has a built-in WebDAV  
server, which allows users to use the DB like a file system.  In fact I  
have used OpenOffice (which supports WebDAV directly) together with the  
VOTable filter to store and retrieve tables directly from and to  
Oracle. Together with the also available LDAP service this is very much  
like a mySpace environment and the DB can even be used to work directly  
on the VOTables as well (using SQL and XPATH at the same time).

Andreas

> wil
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 03:28:02PM +0200, Andreas Wicenec wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I think we should take this into account in our discussions:
>>
>> http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-search- 
>> latest.html
>>
>> I looks like a couple of people have been working quite hard on  
>> defining a
>> generic standard for query services.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andreas