roadmap

[Robert Hanisch]

Tony et al.,

  I start with this part of Tony's message:

> > I know that this seems like a long time but the fact is that
> > standards which are widely agreed and which have been proved
> > to work do take many years to develop.

Yes and no.  In the astronomy community, FITS is the archetype of doing
things slowly and deliberately.  FITS is loved and hated equally (well,
maybe not equally!); the slowness means that FITS is not technologically
very state-of-the-art.  But it works, and as a community we are extremely
well-served by having it.  On the other hand, it has taken us over 10 years
to reach agreements on how to express coordinates.  10 years.  And we are
not finished yet!

The VO is young and still volatile.  This is a plus and a minus.  The plus
is we should be free to experiment, the minus is that we need to build
Something, Now, so that the astronomy community knows what we are up to and
buys into what we are doing.

We need to reach agreements quickly, build to them, and iterate to improve
them.  We need to be willing to build and revise, or even in some cases
throw away and start again.  We have set up a standards process that
recognizes change, and is intended to be responsive to change.  I do not
believe we can afford to set 2-3 year schedules for reaching consensus.  If
it takes this long, the community upon which we will utimately depend for
support will see us as purveyors of snake-oil, and will blow us off.

> > 2004
> > ====
> >  1. Publish RM V1.0 to REC status
> >      31-Mar-2004
> >
> >  2. Agree modified Resource Metadata Schema (RMS) draft v0.91
Whatever the number, this should be ready to promote to V1.0 this summer.
> >      30-May-2004
> >
> >  3. Agree modified Registry Harvesting draft (RH) v0.2
> >      30-May-2004
Ditto.
> >
> >  4. Demonstrate viability of RMS v0.91 and RH v0.2 between projects
> >      1-Jun-2004 to 30-Sep-2004
ok.  We validate RMS and RH over the summer, and bring them forward to RECs
by 1 Sep 04 (bring forward by a month).
> >
> >  5. Create draft Registry Interface spec (RI) v0.1 (incl
> > harvesting & query)
> >      30-Nov-2004
What is this?  A query specification?  We already have harvesting given
above.  And we need a query spec in parallel with the above if we are to
make use of the registry, otherwise it is a blackhole that we pour info into
and have no way of getting it out.  Can't we make use of ADQL?  Why is a
registry so fundamentally different than another VO resource?  A registry is
all metadata, yes, but the mechanisms for querying it should not need to be
any different, should they?

So I am not sure what to say about the rest, except that the event horizon
is way too far away.  We need to push ourselves harder than this, accepting
incompleteness and revisions, but developing and demonstrating registry
capabilties -- metadata, schema, harvesting, querying -- in ~6 months.

We have some other very big challenges to deal with, not at all mentioned
here.  Curation, revision control,  synchronization of distributed
registries.  We have an NVO registry with harvested information from a
number of publishing registries, and it has 4000 or 5000 entries.  Most
entries are next to  useless because the key metadata fields have either not
been populated at all, or have been populated blindly with inappropriate
information.  In some ways even worse, well-intentioned content providers
have assigned resource Titles and Shortnames and Descriptions that make no
sense, that conflict with astronomy community understanding/ expectation,
and generally defeat the purpose of the registry.  Our best-made plans for
metadata elements (RM) and their encoding (RMS) are worthless if we have no
way to review, endorse, validate, and update such information.

Bob

> >  6. Agree draft RMS v0.92
> >      30-Nov-2004
> >
> > 2005
> > ====
> >  7. Demonstrate viability of RMS v0.92 and RI v0.1
> >      1-Dec-2004 to 31-Mar-2005
> >
> >  8. Develop draft RM v1.1 (incorporating schema)
> >      31-May-2005
> >
> >  9. Agree modified RI v0.2
> >      31-May-2005
> >
> > 10. Demonstrate RM v1.1 and RI v0.2
> >      1-Jun-2005 to 30-Sep-2005
> >
> > 11. Publish RM v1.1 to PR/REC
> >      31-Dec-2005
> >
> > 12. Publish RI v1.0 to PR/REC
> >      31-Dec-2005
> >
> > I know that this seems like a long time but the fact is that
> > standards which are widely agreed and which have been proved
> > to work do take many years to develop.
> >
> > The key to keeping this effort moving forwards is that we
> > continue to develop working versions of the registry schema
> > and the harvesting interface. This will allow us to prove
> > that these standards work and to find the problem areas.
> >
> > Feel free to publish an alternative timetable if you think we
> > can deliver the standards in less time than I've indicated.
> > And I look forward to other comments as well.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Tony.
> >
> > __
> > Tony Linde
> > Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292    Mobile: +44 (0)7753 603356
> > Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311    Email:  ael at star.le.ac.uk
> > Post:   Department of Physics & Astronomy,
> >         University of Leicester
> >         Leicester, UK   LE1 7RH
> >
> > Project Manager,            Director,
> > AstroGrid                   Leicester e-Science Centre
> > http://www.astrogrid.org    http://www.e-science.le.ac.uk/
> >
>
>