Posts with the Tag Javascript:

• Query the Registry with WIRR

  2021-07-30 Markus Demleitner

  

  Pixels from venerable VODesktop and WIRR: it's supposed to be about the same thing, except WIRR uses and exposes the latest Registry standards (and then some tech that's not standard yet).

  When the VO was young, there was a programme called VODesktop that had a very nice interface for searching the Registry. Also, it would run queries against the services discovered, giving nice all-VO querying that few modern clients do quite as elegantly. Regrettably, when the astrogrid UK project was de-funded, VODesktop's development ceased in 2010.

  In 2012, it had become clear that nobody would step up to continue it, and I wanted to at least provide a replacement for the Registry interface part. In consequence, Florian Rothmaier and I wrote the Web Interface to the Relational Registry, or WIRR for short; this lets you build Registry queries in your Web Browser in an interface inspired by VODesktop (which, I'm told, in turn was inspired by early iTunes).

  WIRR's sweet spot is between the Registry interfaces in the usual clients (TOPCAT, Aladin: these try to hide the gory details of where their service lists come from and hence are limited in what interaction they allow) and using a TAP client to write and execute RegTAP queries (where there are no limitations beyond the protocol's, but it's tedious unless you happen to know the RegTAP standard by heart).

  In contrast to its model VODesktop, WIRR cannot run any queries against the services discovered using it. But you can transfer the services you have found to clients via SAMP (TOPCAT can handle the relevant MTypes, but I'm frankly not sure what else). Apart from that, an obvious use for WIRR are the queries one needs in VO curation. For instance, I keep linking to it when sending people canned registry queries, as in the section on claiming an authority in the DaCHS Tutorial.

  Given that both Javascript and the Registry have evolved a lot in the past decade, WIRR was in need of a major redecoration for some time now, and in early July, I found some time to do it. The central result is that the code is now halfway modern, strict Javascript; let's see how many web browsers still run that can't execute this.

  On the surface, much less has changed, but there are some news I'd consider noteworthy and that might help your data discovery-fu:

  • Since I've added some constraint types, the constraint type selector is now a hierarchical box, sporting what I think are or should be the most common constraint types (full text, service type and UAT term) on level 0 and then having “Blind Discovery“, “Finer Grained“, and “Special Effects“ as pop-ups; all this so we obey Miller's Rule of Seven.
  • Rather than explain the constraints on a second, separate page, there are now brief help texts coming with each constaint.
  • You can now match against UAT concepts, and there is a completing input box for them; in case you're wondering what this is about, see this post from last February. And yes, next time I'll play with WIRR I'll probably include SemBaReBro here.
  • When constraining by column UCD, you can now choose from UCDs found in the registry (the “Pick one“ button).
  • You can now constrain by spatial, temporal, and spectral coverage, though that's still a gamble because not many (or, actually, very few in the case of temporal and spectral) operators care to declare their services' coverage. When they don't, you won't see their resources with such blind discovery constraints. For some background on this, check Space and Time not lost on the Registry on this blog.
  • There is now a „SQL“ button with successful searches that lets you retrieve the SQL executed for the particular constraint. While that query does not immediately execute on RegTAP services (it's Postgres' SQL rather than ADQL), it ought to give you a head start when transplanting your Registry query into, say, a pyVO-based script.
  • You can now use your browser's back and forward buttons (or, in my case. key bindings) to navigate in your query history.

  What this still doesn't do: Work without Javascript. That's a bit of a disgrace, since after the last changes it would actually be reasonable to provide non-javascript fallbacks for some of the basic functionality (of course, no SAMP at all then…). I'll do it the first time someone asks. Promised.

  A document that now needs at least slight updates because things have moved about a bit is the data discovery use case Florian wrote back then. The updates absolutely necessary are not terribly involved, but I would like to use the opportunity to add a bit more spice to the tutorial. If you have ideas: I'm all ears.

  Oh, and before I close: you can still run VODesktop; kudos to the maintainers of the JVM for that. But it's nevertheless not really usable any more, which perhaps isn't too surprising for a client built on top of experimental online services ten years ago. For one, its TAP client speaks pre-release versions of both TAP and ADQL, so those won't work on modern TAP services (and the ancient ones have vanished). Worse, it needed to use a non-standard extension of RegTAP's predecessor (for those old enough to remember: it used XQuery), and none of the modern searchable registries understands that any more.

  Which is a pity, really. It's been a fine programme. It just was a few years early: By 2012, everything it needed has been defined in nice, stable standards that are still around and probably will be for another decade at least.

• DaCHS 2.4 is out: Blind discovery, pretty datalink, and more

  2021-06-09 Markus Demleitner

  

  DaCHS 2.4: automatic ranges (with registry support!), pretty datalink (with vocabulary support!). And then the usual bunch of improvements (hopefully!).

  I have released DaCHS 2.4 today, and as usual for stable releases, I would like to have something like a commented changelog here so DaCHS deployers perhaps look forward to upgrading – which would be good, because there are far too many outdated DaCHSes out there.

  Among the more notable changes in version 2.4 are:

  Blind discovery overhaul. If you've been following my requests to include coverage metadata three years ago, you have probably felt that the way DaCHS started to hack your RDs to include the metadata it had obtained from the data was a bit odd. Well, it was. DaCHS no longer does that when running dachs limits. While you can still do manual overrides, all the statistics gathered by DaCHS is now kept in the database and injected into the DaCHS' internal idea of your RDs at loading time.

  I have not only changed this because the old way really sucked; it was also necessary because I wanted to have per-column metadata routinely, and since in advanced DaCHS there often are no XML literals for columns (because of active tags), there wouldn't be a place to keep information like what a column is minimally, maximally, in median, or as a “2σ range“ within the RD itself. A longer treatment of where this is going is given in the IVOA note Blind Discovery 2: Advanced Column Statistics that Grégory and I have recently uploaded.

  For you, it's easy: Just run dachs limits q once you're happy with your data, or perhaps once a month for living data, and leave the rest to DaCHS. A fringe benefit: in browser froms, there are now value ranges of the various numeric constraints as placeholders (that's the screenshot on the left in the title picture).

  There is a slight downside: As part of this overhaul, DaCHS is now computing the coverage of SIAP and SSAP services based on the footprints of the products as MOCs. While that gives much more precise service footprints, it only works with bleeding-edge pgsphere as delivered in Debian bullseye – or from our Debian repository. If you want to build this from source, you need to get credativ's pgsphere fork for now.

  Generate column elements: If you have tables with many columns, even just lexically entering the <column> elements becomes straining. That is particularly annoying if there already is a halfway machine-readable representation of that data.

  To alleviate that, very early in the development of DaCHS, I had the gavo mkrd subcommand that you could feed FITS images or VOTables to get template RDs. For a number of reasons, that never worked well enough to make me like or advertise it, and I eventually ended up writing dachs start instead, which is something I like and advertise for general usage.

  However, what that doesn't do is come up with the column declarations. To make good on this, there is now a dachs gencol command that will, from a FITS binary table, a VOTable, or a VizieR-style byte-by-byte description, generate columns with as much metadata as it can fathom. Paste that into the output of dachs start, and, depending on your input format, you should have a quick start on a fairly full-featured data collection (also note there's dachs adm suggestucds for another command that may help quickly generate rich metadata).

  This currently doesn't work for products (i.e., tables of spectra, images, and the like); at least for FITS arrays, I suppose turning their non-obvious header cards into columns might save some work. Let's see: your feedback is welcome.

  Refurbished Datalink XSLT: Since the dawn of datalink, DaCHS has delivered Datalink documents with XSLT stylesheets in order to have nicely formatted pages rather than wild XML when web browsers chance on datalink documents. I have overhauled the Javascript part of this (which, I have to admit, is what makes it pretty). For one, the spatial cutout now works again, and it's modeless (no clicking “edit“ any more before you can drag cutout vertices). I'm also using the datalink/core vocabulary to furnish link groups with proper titles and descriptions, and to have them sorted in in a proper result tree. I've talked about it at the interop, and I've prepared a showcase of various datalink documents in the Heidelberg data centre.

  Update to DaCHS 2.4 and you'll get the same thing for your datalinks.

  Non-product datalinks: When writing a datalink service, you have to first come up with a descriptor generator. DaCHS will provide a simple one for you (or perhaps a bit more complex ones for FITS images or spectra) – but all of these assume that whatever the datalink ID parameter references is in DaCHS' product table. It turned out that in many interesting cases – for instance, attaching time series to object catalogues – that is not the case, and then you had to write rather obscure code to keep DaCHS from poking around in the product table.

  No longer: There is now the //datalink#fromtable descriptor generator. Just fill in which column contains the identifier and the name of the table containing that column and you're (basically) done. Your descriptor will then have a metadata attribute containing the relevant row – along with everything else DaCHS expects from a datalink descriptor.

  gavo_specconv: That's a longer story covered previously on this blog.

  Index declaration in views: Saying on which columns a database index exists allows users to write smart queries, and DaCHS uses such information internally when rewriting geometrical expressions from ADQL to whatever is in use in the actual database. Hence, making sure these indexes are properly declared is important. But at the same time it's difficult for views, because postgres doesn't let you have indexes on views (for good reasons). Still, queries against views will (usually) use indexes of their underlying tables, and hence those should be declared in the corresponding metadata.

  This is tedious in general. DaCHS now helps you with the //procs#declare-indexes-from stream. Essentially, it will compare the columns in the view with the ones from the source tables and then guess which view columns correspond to indexed columns from the source tables; using that, it adds indexed flags to some view columns.

  If all this is too weird for you: Thanks to declare-indexes-from, the index declaration now automatically happens in the modern way to build SSAP services, the //ssap#view mixin. Hence, chances are you won't even see this particular STREAM but just notice its beneficial consequences.

  Sunsetting resources: I've been fiddling off and on with a smart way to pull resources I no longer want to maintain while still leaving a tombstone. I had to re-visit this problem recently because I dropped the Gaia DR1 table from my Heidelberg data centre. So, how do I explain to people why the thing that's been there no longer is?

  In general, this is a rather untractable problem; for instance, it's very hard to do something sensible with the TAP_SCHEMA entries or the VOSI tables endpoints for the tables that went away. Pure web pages, on the other hand, can be adorned with helpful info. To enable that, there is now the superseded meta item, which you define in the RD that once held the resources. For Gaia DR1, here's what I used:

  <meta name="superseded" format="rst">
    We do not publish Gaia DR1 data here any more.
    If you actually need DR1 data, refer to the
    full Gaia mirrors, for instance `the one at
    ARI`_.  Otherwise, please use more recent data
    releases, for instance `eDR3`_.
  
    .. _the one at ARI: http://gaia.ari.uni-heidelberg.de
    .. _eDR3: /browse/gaia/q3
  </meta>
  

  Root page template: I slightly streamlined the default root page template, in particular dropping the "i" and "Q" icons for going to the metadata and querying the service. If you have overridden the root template, you may want to see if you want to merge the changes.

  As usual, there are many more small repairs and additions, but most of these are either very minor or rather technical. One last thing, though: DaCHS now works with Python 3.8 (3.7 will continue to be supported for a few years at least, earlier 3.x never was), which is going to be the python3 in Debian bullseye. Bullseye itself will only have DaCHS 2.3 (with the Python 3.8 fixes backported), though. Once bullseye has become stable, we will look into putting DaCHS 2.4 into the backports.

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