Harvesting

[Ray Plante]

Hey Roy,

Good set of questions!  I'll just tackle one for the moment.

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Roy Williams wrote:
> What if registries are operatring different versions of the VOResource
> schema?
>     -- Do they just ignore each other
>     -- Or should we have a version negotiation protocol?

I recommend we use the following pattern for Schema namespaces:

http://www.ivoa.net/xml/<status>/<schema-name>/<version>

  <status> = one of "prop", "wd", "prec", or "rec"
  <schema-name> = a general name for the schema
  <version> = a version id

e.g. http://www.ivoa.net/xml/prop/VOResource/v0.8.1

If an application wants to be picky about the version, then it just does a 
simple string comparison of the cited namespace URI with the one it 
requires.  If the application can adapt to different versions, it just 
checks to see if the general schema is correct by dropping the last 
field from the namespace URI.  The application can further check 
the version field against those specific versions it supports.  

cheers,
Ray