People and Cars in the VOregistry?

[Doug Tody]

This approach is a surprise to me.  I would expect that user registration
information would be maintained as part of whatever runtime environment
one is using, separate from the registry.  There can be multiple runtime
environments, each with their own requirements, which we would like to
be able to develop independently of the registry.  Furthermore, anything
involving people, personal profiles, login information, etc. is likely
to be secure information, whereas the resource and service registry is
intended to be a much more open, transparent facility.  Don't the Web and
Grid infrastructures already tend to separate the two areas?   Doug


On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Tony Linde wrote:

> 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
> > 
> 
> 
>