Single or collection resources

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear DAL folks,

here is a somewhat "soft" question for a change:

I have various image sets, all of them small-ish or medium sized
(i.e., several 100 to a few 10000s of images); some of them can be
grouped "thematically", e.g.,

* Ancient plate scans from various observatories
* Images of gravitational lenses from various observatories

I can see three strategies to publish them via SIAv1 (disclaimer: I'm
not really up to date on SIAv2 discussions; but then I'd like to have
a short-term, SIAv1-based solution anyway):

(1) provide a SIA service for each data set individually
(2) provide SIA service for each "topic"
(3) do both.

Now, (1) is nice because it lets me specify meaningful RMI-style
metadata (creator, source, etc), so things will look nice in the
registry and users have a fair chance to read up on where the data
actually came from.  Downsides of this include that I'll clutter up
result displays in VO-wide Astroscopes  and similar applications, and
clients will have to issue potentially quite a number of queries to
my server with all the incurred overhead.

(2) is attractive because people interested in, say, gravitational
lenses would have to query just one service on my server and get
everything I have.  But the metadata will be extremely ugly ("creator:
various"), and as far as I can see, SIAv1 does not provide a standard
mechanism to say something like "RMI metadata for this row can be
obtained here".

(3) could be a solution, giving rich metadata on the services but
still providing a service giving people all pertinent information in
one go.  But of course I'll still clutter up Astroscope and friends,
and even worse, each result will show up twice, once in the
collection service, and once in the individual services.

So, I think there's no ideal solution -- but maybe others have
better ideas or at least opinions on what a good VO citizen should
do?

Cheers,

        Markus