TAPRegExt erratum, Identifiers for Obscore

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear DAL list, dear DM list,

There are various ways clients can discover obscore services (or, for
that matter, TAP services containing other data models); the ones I'd
propagate are looking for the data model's ivoid and/or name.  This
information is communicated to the Registries in the TAPRegExt
capability.

And here the trouble starts.  First, I messed up.  For some reason I
cannot find, a bad identifier sneaked into the example in the
TAPRegExt draft; it lists ivo://ivoa.net/std/obscore-1.0 as the
standard id for ObsCore.  Unfortunately, ever since ObsCore did state
their id, it's been ivo://ivoa.net/std/obscore/v1.0.

Now, of 7 services currently registering ObsCore services in the VO,
6 use the wrong one (Kudos to the operators of ivo://jvo/subaru/spcam
who got it right).  That's bad, and I deserve some spanking.

So:

(1) If you have an obscore service, please make sure your standardId
is ivo://ivoa.net/std/obscore/v1.0 rather than whatever is written in
the current TAPRegExt example.

(2) How can I clean up the TAPRegExt example as quickly as possible,
before even more implementors get confused?  Given that this is not
normative text on TAPRegExt's side, could we do some sort of fast
track?  Or can we add an erratum to the document entry page while
matters take their proper way?


Second, there's a related issue; I (probably foolishly) choose to
include the concept of the data model name (in addition to its ivoid)
in the TAPRegExt document as well.  Now, it's always a bad idea to
keep the same information in two places and in two forms, and so
that's the case here, too; check this out:

http://dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/__system__/adql/query/form?__nevow_form__=genForm&query=SELECT%20ivoid%2C%20detail_value%20FROM%20%0A%09rr.res_detail%0AWHERE%20detail_xpath%3D%27%2Fcapability%2FdataModel%27%0A%09AND%201%3Divo_nocasematch(detail_value%2C%20%27%25obscore%25%27)%0A&_TIMEOUT=5&_FORMAT=HTML&submit=Go

So -- some (most) services have "ObsCore-1.0", some "Obscore 1.0".
The forms with the dash surprised me a bit because

(a) the TAPRegExt example has the form without the dash, and
(b) the form with the dash is not present in the ObsCore spec itself;
it gives the dash-less form in the only place that could be construed
as a self-christening.


And yet everyone but myself uses the dashed form.

So: what's the correct form?  Is there one?  What about
capitalization?  Is there some convention on DM names that I'm not
aware of?  And how do we make sure that in the future everyone uses
the same string here?  Or do we just say "If you're looking for
IVOA-sanctioned DMs, only search by ivoid, the names are somewhat
arbitrary?"

Cheers,

         Markus