IVOA Identifiers Working Draft

[Ray Plante]

Hey Gretchen,

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Gretchen Greene wrote:
> This looks great to me,  I'm a little confused though because in the
> last [NVO] metadata telecon,  I thought Arnold made a point that location
> should not be a part of the id,  at least he said he disagreed with me
> on that.  

At the moment, whether IDs are location-dependent is a matter of debate.  
The WD represents a particular state of the debate (from early summer).  
We'll need to get concensus on this question before the WD graduates 
to the next level.  

Personally, I think we need both location-dependent and
location-independent identifiers.  The former allows us to distinguish
between different replicas.  The current WD basically punts on the latter, 
calling it out-of-scope.  To me, the question is do we address the 
location-independent version in this spec.  

> The question I have is that for people building registries,  for example
> in our case...we registered several resources and assigned 'authority
> ids' based on Bob's knowledge.  Now this is a special case I know for
> our prototype/demo work,  but in the future...perhaps registry builders
> decide (and I'm thinking of places like CDS that host LOTS of
> resources),  to swallow up resources.  HOW does the id assignment
> process work in this case?  The resource 'owners' are not the same as
> the registry builders.  

Perhaps we could compare a few scenarios:

  *  At NCSA, we have a publishing registry, where the user picks their 
     own ID, including the authority ID.  To register resource, they first 
     have to register their organization.  This is the organization we 
     consider as controlling the authority ID they have chosen.  

  *  At STScI, Bob assigned some IDs, including the authority IDs.  In 
     this sense, STScI controls the authority ID.  This is fine and 
     consistant as well, even though it doesn't maintain the resources.  

  *  At CDS, they archive and manage all tables published in the journals.  
     Others may maintain the copies of the same tables.  Given the 
     number of resources they manage, they would likely set up their own 
     publishing registry.  They would create and control their own IDs for 
     those resources.  Others that have copies of the same catalogs will 
     register their own copies using their own authority ID, different 
     from what CDS uses. 

Does this address your question?
 
> Maybe there aren't that many resources for this to matter though?

(I think there are.)

cheers,
Ray