RM v1.1 feedback loop from VOResource

[Ray Plante]

Hey Doug,

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Doug Tody wrote:
> A use case is the query response for a DAL query.  What is the value
> of the "Collection" attribute?  This same value may appear as dataset
> metadata, e.g., in a FITS header, placed there by the data creator when
> the dataset is generated.  What a user might expect to see is something
> such as "SDSS-DR2", rather than a full IVOA identifier.  In the case
> of a query parameter one would expect to specify something such as
> "collection=SDSS-DR2".  Ideally a short name such as this is defined by
> the creator when the data collection is registered.

Is it safe to say that we have two consumers of this bit of info, people 
and software?  

In RM, we have chosen to separate this use into the two separate metadata: 
"Identifier" for software use and "ShortName" for display to users.  The 
Identifier URI addresses the scaling problems for ensuring global 
uniqueness associated with ShortName.   For effective use of ShortName, it 
need only be unique within some context (e.g. there's only one SIA with a 
given shortname; see DataScope display), and if it is really only being 
used for display, then it doesn't break things if turns out not to be 
unique.  

So a possible solution is to have two different columns returned, 
"collectionID" and "collectionSN" for returning identifier and shortname, 
respectively.  If this seems too "unnormalized", perhaps there's an easy 
way to record the mapping of SN to ID elsewhere in the response (e.g. 
addendum table in the VOTable file) and only list the ShortName in the 
main table.)

cheers,
Ray