SSN/75.1
Starlink Project
Starlink System Note 75.1
A.C. Davenhall
26 July 2000
Copyright © 2000 Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
Writing Catalogue and Image Servers for GAIA and CURSA
GAIA and CURSA can interrogate remote catalogues via the Internet to return lists of objects which satisfy a given criterion. GAIA can also extract images of a specified region of sky from remote databases. Similar facilities are also available in other packages, such as the ESO SkyCat image display tool and the Gemini observing tool. This functionality is achieved by having servers running on the remote systems which accept queries sent by GAIA etc, interrogate their local copies of the catalogues to find the data which satisfy the query and return them. The servers can communicate with GAIA etc. because the query is sent, and the results returned, in a standard format. This document describes how to write such servers.
Who Should Read this Document?
This document is aimed at programmers who intend to write servers which will provide catalogue and image data for GAIA etc.