[Quality] another can of worms

[Martin Hill]

Hi all

I've been wondering what to do about quality, and how to describe it.

We have a general one - if we allow anyone to publish to the VO, how do 
we describe a datacenter's quality?  There are datacenters setup for a 
sky survey, with all the processing involved that has been set up by 
teams of astronomers (presumably?) double checking each other. And there 
is data published by a small group or an individual so that people can 
access it, but which has not gone through such a rigorous set of tests. 
  We don't really want a general query to the registry returning both as 
'equals value' (or do we?).

We also have a smaller scale one - each item of data may need to be 
marked.  For example, a sky survey may have items that have been marked 
as 'possibly satellite track' or 'instrument feature' (is that the word? 
such as diffraction spikes?)

It's surfaced occasionally in some groups as a 'placeholder' but doesn't 
seem to have been dealt with in itself.  Has anyone come up with a 
framework (I can't find a general one)?  If not, where do we start?  Is 
a 'placeholder' sufficient for all three groups (dal/dm/registry) to 
start with?

I've posted this across all three groups for discussions about quality 
and what it means/implies on a large scale. Obviously it should split 
down when it becomes more specific!  Such as whether [Quantity] should 
include [Quality] as well as [Error]; and whether this is the same 
[Quality] as that attached to a dataset... :-)

Cheers,

Martin

-- 
Software Engineer
AstroGrid @ ROE
Tel: +44 7901 55 24 66
www.astrogrid.org