Registry WG: Attention/Action

[Ray Plante]

Hi Clive,

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Clive Page wrote:
> I'm not entirely convinced that these things really have to be in the
> Registry, nor how practical it will be to maintain them.  

Fair enough.  Hopefully, we'll learn something about this soon enough.

The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I am of its usefulness,
particularly for tracking providence.  When a service description declares
it serves data from such-n-such data collection and is maintained by 
so-n-so organization, it becomes possible to actually trace those
assertions and find out what these things are.  By incorporating these
types of things in a registry, we have a consistant system for finding
things.

I think the keys to maintaining up-to-date descriptions and 
self-consistancy are local control of information and out-of-the-box 
tools.  I don't expect it to be perfect, but I don't think it needs to 
be--just good enough.  I expect (hope?) that better maintained resources 
will be preferred by users.

cheers,
Ray