registry of registries

[Robert Hanisch]

Following today's regular NVO technical telecon, Ray Plante asked that I
post a suggestion I made this morning to this list that might help
clarify/simplify some of the fairly complex ideas people are discussing
regarding hierarchies of registries and such.

I would not expect that we will have a vast number of publishing registries.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, but not likely anything approaching the many
thousands of resources we already have in the registries themselves.  Thus,
we could easily track the publishing registries through an IVOA master
registery.  A site with a publishing registry would register it in the IVOA
master registry.  Sites providing full searchable registries could query the
master registry to make sure their harvesting is complete.  There would be
no need to learn of other registries via word of mouth, or through more
complex or ad hoc approaches, and no need to worry strictly about national
or international hierarchies.  This seems to me a natural function for the
IVOA.  A replica site could certainly be set up to avoid single point of
failure issues.  However, even this does not seem so important given that
the only likely users of the IVOA master registry would be other registries,
and there is little here that is of high time criticality.

Folks on the NVO telecon seemed supportive of this idea.

Cheers,
Bob