RWP04: Registry Replication

[Roy Williams]

> > How about if we have three types of registry:
> >
> > 1. full: will attempt to maintain a full list of all resources on the VO
> > 2. limited: lists only resources of interest to a specific community
> > 3. private: only lists the resources at that location; not queryable

There is a smooth transition here to what we might call type 4: a service
that can describe itself, and therefore acts as a very limited sort of
registry with only one record in it.

Many service models have self-description. In the SOAP model, each service
is able to produce a metadata document about itself, the WSDL file. In the
SIAP protocol, there is a request FORMAT=METADATA that produces a
definition.

Therefore we can have a model where registry types 3, 2, 1 are connecting to
services and asking them to describe themselves. They cache these
description records. Harvesting a registry is just like asking a service for
its own description.

Roy

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Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
roy at cacr.caltech.edu
626 395 3670