registry requirements

[Ray Plante]

Hi,

NVO has started a discussion of registries within our Metadata working 
group, and so I want to share a bit of where we are and to broaden the 
discussion to the IVOA community.

I drafted some requirements that we've discussed and edited slightly; the
latest version is attached.  (At some point, I'll upload them to the Wiki
site.)  I tried to keep them fairly general and solution-free.  More 
comments, additions, or subtractions are welcome.  The plan is to use 
these requirements to evaluate some existing solutions, including the Open 
Archive Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org/), UDDI, GLU, and 
Globus/OGSA.  All solutions are on the table.  

In our telecon discussion, we quickly concluded that an evaluation of the 
requirements would be helped greatly by some use cases, so we started 
generating those.  The ones generated thus far can be reviewed at the Wiki 
site (http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/RegistryUseCases).

We talked a little bit about an architecture for registries.  We agreed 
that we prefered a model in which every site has a local mechanism for 
describing oneself that is controlled and update as necessary by the site 
itself; registries then would access this "explain" service to update its 
internal database.  In this model, the process of "registering" is, at a 
minimum, a matter of giving a registry a pointer (e.g. URL) to the 
"explain" service.  The GLU/DNS model for synchronizing registries was 
also very attractive.

cheers,
Ray




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