illegal/unrecommended use of IVOA identifiers

[Ray Plante]

Hi John et al.

I don't know if this has been pointed out to you or not; however, the 
Plastic Specification is using IVOA identifiers in a non-standard way to 
identify its messages.

The IVOA Identifiers specification
(http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/IDs.html) states that the 
use of the ivo indicates that the identifier has been registered with an 
IVOA registry (section 3.2.2).

To be compliant, each of the Plastic message identifiers would have to be 
registered as a separate resource.  While in principle this is possible, 
this is highly discouraged.  Instead, I would recommend the approach 
that is to be used by the VOSpace standard in which names are identified 
using a # suffix; e.g.,

    ivo://votech.org/plastic#info/getIVORN

For use of an identifier of this form to be compliant, only the 
ivo://votech.org/plastic resource need be registered.  We have a new 
schema we are putting forward for this purpose called VOStandard 
(http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/RegUpgradeSummer2006/VOStandard-v0.1.xsd).
It defines two new Resource sub-classes, Standard and StandardService,
that registers the existance of a standard; the former is probably most 
appropriate for Plastic.  These types do not currently provide metadata 
for defining what I might call properties (e.g. info/getIVORN); however, 
we should probably add that.  Note that the standard being described need 
not be an IVOA standard.

Please let me know if you have any comment or suggestions on this front.
The Registry WG is the WG that handles the Identifier standard.

cheers,
Ray