ADEC and VO data registration

[Roy Williams]

Alberto

In the VO effort, we are very interested in harmonizing our registration of
VOResources with your registration of peer-reviewed datasets.

(1) Your list of datacenters (*) looks to me like a list of what VO is
calling publishing authorities. This is a little more general than just
datacenters -- it would allow non-telescope data to be published (eg theory,
eg derived or federated data). The VO registry scheme is also based on
publishing authorities. Therefore to me, the "astronomy data centers and
archives" that you work with are examples of "publishing authorities".

(2) In this case the questions are who can be a publishing authority, and
what is their responsibility if they are. Equivalently, we can ask how the
list of publishing authorites is extended. What is the proposed review
process that allows flexibility and novelty, but keeps out maniacs and
nutters?

(3) Your validation service for datasets seems to return something simple
("yes", "no", or "bad syntax"). Is that true? However, the VO registry will
return a sophisticated piece of metadata (VOResource.xsd). This is because
of our somewhat different purposes: in VO we want to find and use the data
and its provenance, but your registry is simply asking if the dataset
exists. I wonder how a VO-registered dataset can make its way to your
registry?

(4) Sematically, the identifiers look similar, and are similar to the ISBN
number for books. A publishing authority followed by an ID that is local to
that authority. Would it be possible to iron out some of the syntactic
differences between identifiers -- the use of colon, slash, etc etc is
different? How concrete is your identifier syntax?

Roy Williams

* http://ads.harvard.edu/www/dv/facilities.txt

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Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
roy at cacr.caltech.edu
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