RofR

[Tony Linde]

I'm unclear about what the registry of registries (RofR) is going to do. I
understand that *every* registry is listed there, whether full or
publishing. 

Let's distinguish between full and publishing registries. A full registry is
expected to contain all known resources, kept up to date via some harvesting
mechanism; it exposes one or more query mechanisms. A publishing registry
only contains a few local resources, kept up to date via some local
mechanism; it does not support any query mechanism.

The original idea behind the owned/managed authIDs was that a publishing
registry would have one or more owned authIDs and resources with identifiers
under those authIDs. A full registry would also have owned authIDs but would
'manage' the authIDs for one or more publishing registries. The publishing
registries would only have to support a simple push (update) or pull
(harvest) interface with one full registry. Noone else would ever know about
the publishing registry. The full registry would ensure that noone else
registered either the owned or managed authIDs. Other full registries would
only ever harvest from full registries, gathering resources under both the
owned and managed authIDs.

Now the first problem with the RofR is that it contains access information
about every publishing registry, which previously was hidden from world
view. What is this going to be used for?

Are all the full registries expected to harvest from *all* the publishing
registries? This may be a problem for sites which do not want wide-open
access to their registry.

If not, why are all the publishing registries listed at all? Why not just
list full registries so that all full registries can use that to find the
sites they are supposed to harvest from.

I daresay I've misunderstood the RofR concept so could someone step through
the registration/harvesting scenarios for me.

Cheers,
Tony. 

__
Tony Linde
Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292    Mobile: +44 (0)7753 603356
Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311    Email:  Tony.Linde at leicester.ac.uk
Post:   Department of Physics & Astronomy,
        University of Leicester
        Leicester, UK   LE1 7RH
Web:    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~ael
            
Project Manager, EuroVO VOTech   http://eurovotech.org 
Programme Manager, AstroGrid     http://www.astrogrid.org 
Co-Director,
 Leicester e-Science Centre      http://www.e-science.le.ac.uk/