policy issues

[Pierre Fernique]

Robert Hanisch wrote:
> One of the charges to Rwg1 concerns identifying policy matters relevant 
> to registries.  Tony, Marco, and I have assembled this list of issues.
>  
> Bob
>  
> 
> Registry Policy Issues
> 
> Draft, 10 April 2003
> 
> As we move forward in the development of Resource and Service Registries 
> for the Virtual Observatory, we can anticipate needing to deal with 
> several policy issues.
> 
> ·         Do we need to control or restrict in any way the ability of 
> groups or individuals to register resources and services?  Thus far we 
> have tried to be as open and inclusive as possible, though we then have 
> the risk of people registering poor quality or inappropriate services, 
> or of permitting some sort of malicious corruption to the registries.
> 
> ·         Should we develop some sort of VO endorsement for registered 
> resources and services, i.e., a “seal of approval”?  Such endorsements 
> could be managed by the various national projects, with a national 
> endorsement serving as an implicit IVOA endorsement for IVOA member 
> organizations.  What process should we use to review and grant such 
> endorsements?
> 
> ·         We will need to have some editorial control over the 
> registries, e.g., to remove inappropriate and inactive resources and 
> services, and to correct erroneous entries.  Who should have this 
> responsibility, and how is editorial access controlled?
> 
> ·         Should we, and if so, how do we, control the number and 
> quality of registry servers/ services themselves?  How do we assure that 
> multiple registry services are properly synchronized?  Do we care if 
> different registries focus on different types of resources and services, 
> or should all registries be 100% inclusive?
> 


I definitely agree with these points. The policy for a good quality of 
resource descriptions is certainly more important than the repository 
technical solution itself.
Also, our experience with GLU shows us that the resource descriptions 
really used by some institutes for their own functional services are 
generally correctly maintained, other are forgotten and left "as is" in 
the repository. Even with an automatic synchronization system as the GLU 
has, we have this kind of problem, simply the synchronization mechanism 
is applied on out-of-date resource descriptions. And more, as each 
resource cannot be modified or removed by other people than its owner 
(GLU distributed authentification mechanism), we cannot clean ourself 
old resource descriptions without contacting the owner.

As you suggest we should have several synchronized repository centers in 
charge of maintaining a set of resources exactly in the same way that we 
can have moderators on mailing lists, or how Astroweb had been designed 
several years ago. But perhaps not systematically on the institutes 
level as the GLU does presently, but on a more global level (countries 
?) if institutes agree to "delegate" this task.


Regards,
Pierre Fernique