MType list

[Mark Taylor]

Dear sampers,

The formal RFC period for the SAMP PR is now at an end, and the comments 
gathered look mostly quite positive.  There are a number of editorial 
items that (which??) I will address over the next day or two and issue 
a modified document.

One point which has been brought up by three of the reviewers is the
arrangement for documenting the list of non-administrative MTypes, 
discussed in section 5.3.  This section is deliberately vague 
about where this list is kept, in order to allow flexibility about 
how/where MTypes are defined, and not to tie it to the SAMP document 
itself.  At present, the list of MTypes is on the 
not-particularly-easy-to-find wiki page at:

    http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SampMTypes

In practice, the only way that developers are likely to find this
is by asking somebody who already knows where it is, which I admit
is not very satisfactory.

Possible responses to this reviewers' comment could be:

   a) we don't yet have a settled idea of how/where these MTypes will be
      kept; therefore insist on leaving it vague in the text

   b) add a reference in the text to the wiki page as the current MType
      repository, with a note that in future some other URL or
      arrangement may be used (wiki pages are typically not stable
      enough to serve as long-term resources)

   c) agree to issue an IVOA Note containing the existing list of MTypes,
      and fix the text to refer to this as something which will soon be
      available

   d) agree to issue an IVOA Recommendation Track document along the
      lines of the UCD1+ Controlled Vocabulary document, as suggested
      by Jesus Salgado, and fix the text to refer to this as something
      which will be available (once it's gone through the lengthy
      recommendation process)

   e) come up with a location independent of the IVOA at which this list
      could be stored, and fix the text to reference this URL.
      This would most likely have to be a new domain, either bought
      direct or hosted within some third-party project (sourceforge or
      similar, as with the plastic.sourceforge.net site).

   f) something else?

Of these (e) would in some ways be the best, since a SAMP web site 
could also contain other useful content, such as short tutorial 
introductions complementing the Standard document itself, and 
lists of/links to applications which implement SAMP.  The PLASTIC 
sourceforge website was quite an asset in this way.  However, this 
option is also the most effort since it requires somebody to host 
a web site, or to arrange one which we can use.  I asked Bruno whether 
this sort of content would be welcome on the IVOA web site itself 
(e.g. www.ivoa.net/samp/) but, not unreasonably, he wasn't very keen, 
at least not without getting agreement from the IVOA Exec.
Are there any volunteers for setting something like this up? 
I don't mind generating some of the content, but I'm not sure about
how to go about acquiring an independent domain name and setting up 
a web server on it.  I note that samp.sourceforge.net is taken 
(Still Another Math Program), and in any case the site will not mostly
be for hosting source code so sourceforge is probably not appropriate.

Failing that, I think that either (c) or, if allowed by the TCG, (a)
would be probably the best solution.  It would be relatively easy 
to come up with the text for an IVOA Note, and this could be issued 
in the near future.  Updates of the Note could be issued as new 
MTypes came into use.  A discussion area (like the one on the wiki at 
present) would probably still be required, as a kind of "holding area" for 
MTypes to be included in the next update of the Note.  A disadvantage
is that, although easier than Recommendation Track documents, 
the effort involved in issuing a Note still provides a bit of a barrier to
making and publicisng small incremental changes in the list of known 
MTypes, which application authors might want to do, which is easy on 
a wiki (for related reasons I'm not keen on (d)).
Another disadvantage is that if we decide at some time in the future
to host the MType list on a web site or elsewhere, a SAMP document 
which pointed at a particular IVOA Note would become out of date - this 
is why I wanted to keep the two decoupled.

Does anybody have input on how we should respond to this comment?
It would be good to have fairly prompt replies so we can continue the
recommendation process without too much delay.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/