tap

A guide for working with the astronomical Table Access Protocol, or TAP, which lets software query astronomy data services. It covers related formats, metadata, asynchronous jobs, and ADQL, a query language for astronomical data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for TAP queries, service metadata, VOTable results, asynchronous UWS jobs, output formats, and related client or library behavior.
Why use it?
It provides protocol-specific rules and references when building or reviewing software that exchanges astronomy data through TAP.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/starfetch-js/starfetch/tap
Any agent
npx skills add starfetch-js/starfetch --skill tap
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/starfetch-js/starfetch

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,059 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00059 $0.01059
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00530
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00212
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00106

Measured yesterday against content hash 32d8447ee755, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tap scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.codex/skills/tap/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

TAP Skill

Use this skill for TAP-family protocol work. Keep project-specific product decisions in the repo's AGENTS.md and planning docs; keep this skill focused on general TAP, ADQL, VOSI, VOTable, UWS, and related IVOA behavior.

Workflow

  1. Identify which protocol area the task touches: TAP resources, query parameters, VOSI metadata, VOTable results, ADQL, UWS async jobs, output formats, registry discovery, or authentication.
  2. Read the relevant official spec from the index when exact protocol behavior matters.
  3. Prefer implementation notes that preserve interoperability over service-specific assumptions.
  4. Keep Starfetch v1 TAP/ADQL-first unless the active issue explicitly expands scope.
  5. When behavior is intentionally deferred, name a concrete follow-up instead of leaving the gap implicit.

Spec Index

Use official IVOA documents rather than vendoring large specs locally.

When a task depends on a precise requirement, use the versioned recommendation linked from the official "latest" page and cite the exact source in the response or implementation note.

TAP Checklist

For TAP query execution:

  • resolve the TAP base URL before building child resources;
  • use /sync for synchronous queries and /async for UWS jobs;
  • default LANG=ADQL;
  • send query text as QUERY;
  • prefer RESPONSEFORMAT for requested output;
  • avoid obsolete TAP 1.0-era request patterns unless compatibility handling is explicitly needed;
  • treat VOTable as the baseline result format.

For TAP parameters:

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 100 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 32d8447ee755

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tap is a skill published in the GitHub repository starfetch-js/starfetch (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,059 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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