Alternative proposal

[Doug Tody]

On Thu, 10 May 2007, Robert Hanisch wrote:
>
> Anita, what I meant when I said that "the simple stuff is not done well or
> completely" is that resource providers don't do a very good job of entering
> metadata.  They have poor tools (our fault), astronomer-unfriendly
> documentation (our fault), and are well-intentioned (usually) and lazy (not
> our fault).  As a result, relevant resources are not always found, and
> irrelevant resources show up (e.g., something claims to be a SIAP service
> but it is not).  I came across many many situations like this during an
> intense period of testing ~2 months ago.  Our resource metadata is in poor
> shape.  Resource and service providers, I found, were eager to fix things
> once they were aware of the problems.  But reviewing and testing all of this
> is very labor intensive.

This is the "real VO" situation.  We can conclude 1) the real user
community of data providers won't generally be able to do the resource
metadata without help, 2) active effort centered around the Registry,
linking clients, providers, services, and staff, will be required for
the VO to succeed as an operational facility.  Frameworks can help a lot,
but we already know from curating data in archives and other facilities
like ADS, how hard a problem curation of this kind of information can be.

The point of course, is that in the more general case where we have
to help users and providers in the outside community, pushing curation
of semantically-rich resource metadata down to the level of individual
resources is not going to work.  I think though we can do it in a more
automated fashion for service and data-related metadata.

	- Doug