Simple Spectral Access for IFS service
Overview
The Simple Spectral Access (SSA) for Integral Field Spectra (IFS) service provides a Virtual Observatory (VO) compliant standard interface to query and access IFS data hosted at Data Central, and is based on the existing SSA service.
Queries may be submitted through an HTTP GET request to the service. Results of the query are returned in VOTABLE format that includes spectra metadata and links to spectra.
Access to the SSA service is provided via a synchronous web resource available from the following link:
- Interface to send queries: https://datacentral.org.au/vo/ssa-ifs/query
The implementation meets the requirements of the SSA Version 1.1 specifications.
Workflow
The intended workflow of the SSA service is as follows:
- The user supplies an HTTP GET query to the query interface URL.
- A query is performed using the query parameters, producing a list of available spectra.
- If the POS parameter is specified, the results are ordered in increasing distance from the position
- A VOTABLE with the query results is returned with each row containing an access_url link.
- The access_url is a Datalink-enabled service that returns a spectrum (on request) for each result.
Query Parameters
The same parameters as Simple Spectral Access (SSA) Service are supported. The only required parameter is REQUEST, so each query requires REQUEST=queryData to be added to the URL. However, if you are using pyvo to access the SSA service, this is not required since this is handled internally.
This means that it is possible to submit queries that are not cone searches based on positions.
Unlike SIA, multiple values for each parameter are not permissible, however some parameters may allow lists of values to be specified.