SSA Draft Abstract

The goal of this Simple Spectrum Access (SSA) specification is to define a uniform interface to 1d spectra and spectral energy distribution (SED) measurements which are stored on-line. The term simple in Simple Spectrum Access refers to the design goal of simplicity in retrieving spectroscopic data from distributed data collections. It does not necessarily mean that implementing an SSA service is trivial but the effort to make a data collection SSA compliant is sought to be minimal. The Data Access Layer (DAL) working group supports the implementation of reference services which can serve as templates for other data providers.

The SSA interface is similar to that of Simple Image Access (SIA) and Cone Search (CS). In particular the query/response protocol and getData method follow the same principal:

1. The metadata query mode returns the usage of an SSA service encoded as VOTable document.
2. The spectrum query mode returns a table of matching observations including access references and
3. a getter method is used to access an individual spectrum or set of SEDs.

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