summary of recent RI discussion

[Tony Linde]

> Surely the separation of the owned Authority and searchable 
> Authority concept is still needed even by the registry of 
> registries fully to describe what is out there.  As well as 
> <Registry> records, it needs to contain <Authority> records, 

Why should it contain auth records? Any full registry contains all records
so has all the auth records anyway. The registry of registries simply makes
it easier to find new registries that have been added and from which one
must harvest.

> and I rather liked your idea to have an element in the 
> Authority that points to the "owning" registry, which would 
> fulfil this role. 

I assume you mean an additional element in the authority record, not in the
authority element. Sounds a good idea - I'd assumed it was there.

> The "managedAuthority" elements in each of 
> the Registry elements would then be the list of authorityIDs 
> that were searchable in a particular registry (i.e. the set 
> of harvested, and owned AuthorityIDs). 

No - all records are searchable in a registry. The owned and managed authIDs
are the ones which are harvested.

> 1. A registry can "own"/publish more than one Authority 2. 
> Not all registries will be able to support all specialized 
> schema extensions, 

Registries do not have to 'support' the schema extensions in the sense of
being able to interpret them. They just have to store them. Basically, if a
search matches a record, the whole record is returned, whatever its
structure.

> I still think that it might be better to replace the term 
> "managed" with "searchable"  in these discussions, because I 
> think that "manage" has meant "own" to some people.

No, because a registry is searchable on all authIDs, not just the ones it
owns and manages.

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-registry at eso.org [mailto:owner-registry at eso.org] 
> On Behalf Of Paul Harrison
> Sent: 11 April 2005 11:58
> To: Ray Plante
> Cc: registry at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: summary of recent RI discussion
> 
> Ray Plante wrote:
> > Hi RWGers,
> > 
> > I thought I would try to summarize what I think is the state of the 
> > various discussion threads.  I wasn't sure until I started looking 
> > back at the discussion, but we actually have made some progress.  
> > Here's my summary, segregated by topic.
> > 
> > 1. ownedAuthority ==> registry of registries
> > 
> > We ressurected the discussion of an <ownedAuthority> tag as 
> part of a 
> > mechanism for determining what registries to harvest from and 
> > aggregating the harvesting at the national/regional level.  The 
> > various solutions posed suffered from a certain amount of 
> complexity.  
> > Bob Hanisch suggested that the IVOA sponsor a "registry of 
> > registries": a small registry containing only Registry records.  It 
> > provides a central place for publishers to register their 
> publishing 
> > registries and full registries a place to find out how to 
> publish from.
> > 
> > The idea of aggregating the harvesting was dropped given the 
> > simplicity of this new mechanism: the number of registries 
> to harvest 
> > from might be in the low tens.  Thus, <ownedAuthority> is 
> not needed.  
> > This idea also eliminates the need for a harvester interface, which 
> > currently included a
> > harvest() function and possibly a getRegistries() function.
> 
> Surely the separation of the owned Authority and searchable 
> Authority concept is still needed even by the registry of 
> registries fully to describe what is out there.  As well as 
> <Registry> records, it needs to contain <Authority> records, 
> and I rather liked your idea to have an element in the 
> Authority that points to the "owning" registry, which would 
> fulfil this role. The "managedAuthority" elements in each of 
> the Registry elements would then be the list of authorityIDs 
> that were searchable in a particular registry (i.e. the set 
> of harvested, and owned AuthorityIDs). There are several use 
> cases this model can support, that are needed by the current 
> set of registry implementations/deployments.
> 
> 1. A registry can "own"/publish more than one Authority 2. 
> Not all registries will be able to support all specialized 
> schema extensions, so it will not be the case that all 
> registries are equal - i.e. it will not be possible to create 
> an "uber"-registry that could satisfy any query by harvesting 
> from all the publishing registries. The registry of 
> registries does allow an agent to discover which of the 
> registries can service a query for a particular AuthorityID.
> 
> I still think that it might be better to replace the term 
> "managed" with "searchable"  in these discussions, because I 
> think that "manage" has meant "own" to some people.
> > 
> > 2. harvesting all vs. managed
> > 
> > We all like the idea of being able to get all records from 
> a registry 
> > or just those that originated from that registry.  It was agreed to 
> > define an OAI set called "ivo_managed" to harvest the latter subset.
> 
> It is a good idea, but should be used with caution if the aim 
> is then for a searchable registry to claim to manage all of 
> the harvested records, as (see my point 2 above) the registry 
> might not be able to "understand" all of the schema 
> extensions enough to be able to pass them on.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Paul Harrison
> ESO Garching
> www.eso.org
>