People and Cars in the VOregistry?

[Tony Linde]

Main reason is that people will want to use the VO.

If a person kicks off a job from one portal, how do they come back in later
to find it? The portal needs to keep a list of registered users and link
results to users. This applies even more if space is allocated to the user
for storage of results etc - we'll want to set quotas probably.

Does a person need to register with every portal? Why not register once and
have their details replicated around all the portals? Hey! We could use the
registry for that :)

Seriously, AstroGrid has hit this issue sooner since we're building a
complete infrastructure, including portal, community (users & groups),
personal distributed storage space etc. All of these require unique user
identification. Certificates would do but I don't think the astronomy world
is ready for universal certification; and probably wouldn't contain all the
metadata we might want to store.

At the moment, AstroGrid has separate storage for resource and community
metadata, resource metadata being in the registry. I was assuming this was
the best approach but when I saw that NVO was going to include people in the
registry, I worked with Ray to ensure it was included in an efficient
manner. In the next iteration AG will integrate the community metadata into
the/a registry.

Using the registry approach means that community information can be
replicated and stored in the same way as resource info. This doesn't mean it
has to be in the same file or managed by the same service. Different
registries may choose to hold only service-type data and some community-type
data while others hold both because they have a huge server running DB2 that
they have to justify!

AG will likely create its own set of schemas for community metadata in the
next iteration (Oct-Dec) if it won't impact other projects and will then put
this forward as an IVOA proposed standard after we've tested the concept.

Hope this provides suitable explication, Roy.

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roy Williams [mailto:roy at cacr.caltech.edu] 
> Sent: 11 September 2003 14:08
> To: Ray Plante; Tony Linde
> Cc: registry at ivoa.net
> Subject: People and Cars in the VOregistry?
> 
> 
> Ray and Tony
> 
> What is the purpose of putting "people" descriptors in the VO 
> registry? In involves a lot of new schema and promise of new 
> work to manage this new aspect. What is the benefit? There 
> are already directories of members of AAS etc, are we 
> reinventing the wheel? Was this just somebody's off-the-cuff 
> suggestion at some meeting, or is there a real purpose? What 
> is the use case?
> 
> Surely our core mission is to register *services* and 
> *datasets*? We want to relate datasets to other datasets and 
> the services that made them.
> 
> I go along with projects, organizations and other "secondary" 
> material because they just use generic VOResource schema 
> (title, description etc) and little extra effort is needed.
> 
> Real librarians do not have registries of people -- or at 
> least they use different systems for people and books. When 
> we put in people there are essentially new kinds of record 
> that pull our registry further from interoperating with the 
> rest of the digital library world.
> 
> While we are on the topic, can I put in a request for a bit 
> of schema that covers automobiles? I would like to register 
> my car in the VO registry.  :-)
> 
> Roy
>