table metadata and the registry

[Doug Tody]

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Tony Linde wrote:

> My apologies re Capability - I've been away too long - I thought the catalog
> stuff was in the capability section.

I was also surprised to learn that you were returning dataset metadata in
this fashion; it just came out in more detailed discussions this week.
I knew that AstroGrid was caching table metadata in the registry, but
not how it was getting into the registry.  Clearly we were right to put
Registry-DAL integration on the agenda for this interop.

I have to say, it is not clear why the registry or registry-based apps
should care much how the service delivers such data, except perhaps
as how it affects registry content in the sense that Ray mentions
(we assume service metadata is cached and searchable).  From the DAL
perspective table metadata is science data - bulk science datasets and
their associated metadata are in the same category - and our priority
is to deliver both to client apps via a consistent, convenient to
use interface.

Ultimately however, for a given GET-based service, regardless of the
details of the service interface, this will just reduce to a fixed URL
which we could probably manage to expose in the standard service metadata.
The only thing that might be different than now if you want to cache
this information, is that it might be necessary to fetch the data from
these URLs when something unspecified triggers an update.

	- Doug