How to Publish to the NVO

[Ray Plante]

Gentle Theorists,

During a recent chat, Sebastien Derriere reported on a meeting of 
VOTheorists in which there was some discussion of how one should publish 
simulation data and/or services to the VO.  I thought that I would mention 
a document I wrote for the NVO called "How to Publish to the NVO".  It's 
meant to be a brief introduction to VO publishing with pointers to how to 
get started.  It's a little out of date at the moment (an update is in the 
works), but it is not inaccurate.  I would be interested to get some 
feedback from your group about how applicable you feel it is to 
theory-related resources.  In particular, if you have suggestions for 
addressing the theory community, this would get a great time to get those.  

In the VO, we talk a lot about registering standard services like SIA and 
SkyNodes.  However you may not be aware that it is currently possible to 
register general data collections and non-standard services, including 
those that have a web-page interface.  While I'm sure that you will 
benefit from some standards that are specifically targetted to the theory 
community in the future, you may find the generic resource descriptions 
useful today.  In fact, I would encourage you to visit the registry at 
NCSA (http://nvo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvoregistration.html) and try registering 
somethings.  This site provides a sandbox version that allows you to try 
out the interface without actually publishing anything.  

Finally, to the Registry WG, it's been suggested that we take a look at 
this document and see if there is an IVOA version we might publish as a 
note.  Your feedback is welcome as well.  

cheers,
Ray