Introduction to the RSP API Aspect

On the the main landing page at data.lsst.cloud there is an “APIs” panel however this is not yet active for DP0. The only Web API provided for DP0.2 is a TAP service for catalog access via the Portal and Notebook Aspects. Image access is not yet supported via TAP. Other IVOA standard APIs that we expect to support in the future include SCS for simple catalog searches, SIAv2 for image searches, SODA for image cutouts and mosaics, and VOSpace (in addition to WebDAV) for access to user files.

The Table Access Protocol (TAP) service

Use of the TAP service to query catalogs via the Portal is described in Introduction to the RSP Portal Aspect.

In the Notebook Aspect, a TAP service is instantiated in a python notebook and used to execute an ADQL query and return a result set. A set of utilities are provided to get a TAP service instance.

from rubin_jupyter_utils.lab.notebook import get_tap_service, retrieve_query
service = get_tap_service()
query = "SELECT TOP 100 * FROM dp01_dc2_catalogs.forced_photometry"
results = service.search(query)
results.to_table().show_in_notebook()

Several of the DP0 Jupyter notebook tutorials demonstrate how to use the TAP service programmatically from a python notebook.