Comments regarding the relationship of this use case to ESAP are largely the same as #131, with the exception (of course) of programmatic access.

In principle, the query form provided by ESAP can be arbitrarily complex. It would be possible to (e.g.) provide a form which enables the user to directly enter ADQL into ESAP, then forwards it to the service being queries.

However, given that archives may — as ESO demonstrates — provide a variety of complex query mechanisms, it would be less than optimal to try to provide interfaces for all of them within ESAP.

More effective may to redirect the user to the “native” query interface, and provide them with the capability to import the results of their queries back into ESAP. This would certainly be possible (if, perhaps, clunky) if the archive provides results in the form of a VOTable which the user can download, load into TOPCAT, and broadcast to ESAP using SAMP. We could also provide a direct VOTable upload capability.

Even better would be to have hooks that archives can use to send query results directly to ESAP. This would likely require cooperation on the part of all the various archive developers/maintainers, though, and achieving that consensus seems unlikely within the lifetime of the ESCAPE projects.

Suggestions of ways in which this could be best addressed most welcome!