discussion checkpoint

[Ray Plante]

Hi all,

I'm seeing progress, again!  It might be good to checkpoint the 
discussion.  Before I get into this, I would encourage people to take care 
with their Subject lines, so that we can all keep up with the discussion.  
If you sense a thread drifting away from the topic in the Subject line, 
consider creating a new subject.  

Again, respond if I've missed or missed represented something:

1. Registry of Registries

There is broad support for this.  There is also interest in supporting 
aggregation of harvesting; however, several people (from different 
projects) have pointed out that this can handled as an internal mechanism, 
without need for any support in the interoperable spec.  That is, there is 
no need for the world to know that Joe-registry is actually gathering 
records from other hidden registries.  This means that we don't need to 
have separate <ownedAuthority> and <managedAuthority> tags.  

2. Extension Schemas

This has safely broken off into its own discussion thread.  That is, it 
does not have a direct bearing on (1) which addresses how registries join 
the VO and how registries know who to harvest.  

The important questions are:
  *  if a registry claims to be full, must it store records that use 
       extensions it doesn't understand.  
  *  if a searchable registry does store records with non-standard 
       extensions should it support searching against it (at least, on the 
       standard bits)?  

Discussion is still out on this.

3.  ADQL/XPath ==> RQL

The summary of this one is largely the same as my last summary (see 
http://www.ivoa.net/forum/registry/0504/1323.htm), with the exception that 
use of the ADQL where clause may imply more capability than we can/want to 
support.  Discussion on this point and the question of sending XML over 
the wire is progressing.  

I might predict that this thread will successfully pull out the main 
issues before the May interop, but not necessarily a solution.  This will 
make it a good topic of discussion there.  

4.  Registry record metadata

This hasn't had its own thread, but a lot has been said about what is 
needed in the registry record.  It's been planned that the 
VORegistry schema would be updated in conjunction with RI.  Here's a list 
of the registry-specific information we feel fairly confident we need:

  o  if it is a publishing registry
  o  the authority IDs that originate in this registry*
  o  the base URL for the OAI (Get) interface (if supported)
  o  the base URL for the OAI WS interface (if supported)
  o  the base URL for the Search interface (if supported)
  o  whether it attempts to be a full registry

*I mentioned that it would be easier to maintain this information if it 
were part of an Authority records, <owningRegistry>, rather than putting 
it in the Registry record as <ownedAuthority>; however, several (most?) 
registries have already implemented support for it in the registry record.  

---

We still need to address the issue of record curation/stamping; not much 
more has transpired on this front since my last summary.

cheers,
Ray