AstroGrid registry structure

[Roy Williams]

> Put simply, my biggest problem with VOResource schema is that,
> if I expand, say, Project, I see that (unless I am misreading) I must
> include Curation information and can include Coverage and Content
> information. To my mind, these are not relevant to the description of a
> project. Where do I store the information about the project funders
> or other project information?

I think the elephant is useful here. As you point out, the concept of
"project" can have different interpretations to different people -- like the
blind men feeling the elephant. In OAI, each object can have multiple
metadata descriptions, one for the financial office (who are the funders),
one for the librarian (subject index), one for the grid engineer (the WSDL
files). Astronomers are interested in the "6D data cube" that is the sky.

But in VOResource, curation is included every time, it is the only mandatory
page when you fill in the forms to register your Project -- or Data
Collection, or Service -- to the VO Registry. What is the Title, who is the
publisher of record, who created it, etc. You can also add other metadata
description pages, as above.

The reason that curation is so special is that is that it aligns with Dublin
Core, which is a standard curation labelling already used by a very wide
community -- the entire digital library world! Therefore it will be easy for
a VO registry to become part of a wider University Library system if we
decide that curation information should be mandatory.

> We've not yet even had a debate about
> what information is stored about project, person, group, etc.
> Organisation has the same structure - why?

First I want to push a resolution that it should be possible to make a
Dublin Core record from everything in the repository. From that we build
metadata schema for the different views of different Entities that are
described in the registry. Yes there will be a schema to express funding and
other bureaucratic information. Whoever wants it will start a Working Group,
which will draft a schema to be approved through IVOA. I think it would also
be a good idea for each schema to be bundled with a form that allows a human
to instantiate the schema.

Some Entities have been suggested by the NVO: Coverage, Data Collection,
SIAP service, and each has a suggested schema. Let us start thinking of
Entities and their different types of metadata description (Schemata).

Roy