IVOA Identifiers Working Draft

[Gretchen Greene]

Thanks Ray for your prompt reply.  Well yes,  you mostly answered my
question and it sounds fine what you have suggested.  If I understand
correctly then, this suggests registries can serve resources (some
mirrored of partially replicated) with independent authority ids from
other registries.

I guess for large archive centers,  the id's will evolve consistent with
the management of the registry and the main goal up to this point is to
establish the 'standard' form.

Are there any specific sw dev plans for networking registries together
across oceans and performing id matching/checking [naturally it would be
a key element for comparing] to determine resource uniqueness?  Perhaps
this is discussed at the meeting.
 
To sum this up,  there is no central control for id assignment for VO
resources?

-Gretchen




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-registry at eso.org [mailto:owner-registry at eso.org] On Behalf
Of Ray Plante
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 8:03 PM
To: Gretchen Greene
Cc: registry at ivoa.net
Subject: RE: IVOA Identifiers Working Draft

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