Resources = services!

[Tony Linde]

> 1. A General, Extensible model

Extensibility needs to be bounded otherwise it leads to chaos. You want to
set the boundaries at 'anything to do with VOs' while I would argue to
narrow that to 'anything in the VO which can be invoked and can perform
actions of benefit to the caller'. SMFs or registry extensions would then be
used to manage either extensibility.

> 2. The Need for a Complete and Consistant Registry
> 
>    A Full registry, when it contains resources of all 
> classes, provides a complete and consistant picture of everything the VO
knows 
> about VO components.  

But in your example it only provides 'a complete and consistant picture' to
the level one up from the lowest, so your service has a pointer to the
organization resource but the metadata for the organization, unless it is
only curation metadata, would not lead to other resources - it all has to
stop somewhere. 
(Shades of Derrida and continual deferral of meaning - AstroDeconstruction?
:) )

> 3. Inclusion in a IVO-wide registry serves as a recognition of 
>    IVO compliance.

I think this gets into the policy area. In general, we aren't going to
exclude resource registration but will come up with some sort of 'badge of
approval' scheme, so this is not really relevant.

> 4. The cost of filtering out non-service resources within a 
> ...
>    In the VOResource schema, service descriptions are clearly 
> marked by their root element: <Service>.  

Does this <Service> item include all of the items that I've referred to as
services (catalogs, datasets, images, cube cutouts, extraction, data
copying, etc...) and ONLY those items?

> I sense that the cost to users, which I address in (4), is at ...

Cost is only a part of it; it is more a matter of consistency. It doesn't
seem worth bundling together information which doesn't even share the most
basic of metadata: you wouldn't normally speak of 'curation' metadata when
talking about an organization or an astronomer (cure maybe but not
curation).

Cheers,
Tony. 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray Plante [mailto:rplante at poplar.ncsa.uiuc.edu] 
> Sent: 28 May 2003 07:36
> To: registry at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: Resources = services!
> 
> ...