"RegTAP" vs "relational registry"

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Registry WG,

Before Christmas, I wrote:

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 09:58:24AM +0100, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> There's been some brief internal discussion on the names of
> "TAP+model" standards.  This has been an issue for ObsCore vs. ObsTAP
> already, and it comes up with what I've so far called "RegTAP" for
> short and "relational registry" for long.

to eventually come up with the proposal


> So, after consideration I believe what we should have for RegTAP and
> all the similar endeavours that may follow is the name is the
> tableset.  "Relational (observation metadata|registry)" sound like
> resonable names for those, at least for people dealing with
> relational databases (I'm not proposing to change ObsCore's name now,
> but if it's reworked, moving into that direction sounds like a good
> idea to me).  The corresponding acronyms could then be RelObs or
> RelReg, and whenever TAP/ADQL-specific aspects come up, people could
> say "RelReg over TAP" or so.
> 
> If you agree with these thoughts, I'll do the redactional changes to
> "RegTAP" some time after christmas, for what I hope might then go on
> to become PR.

Since nobody protested, I tried this yesterday, and while I still
think that's a good idea in principle, I'd like to retract the
promise about the change.  

I suspect changing the short name of a standard that has made it to
the IVOA documents page has never been done before, has it?  The
trouble is that the acronym is everywhere: In two places of the URL,
in the standard id, and so on.

This means that if we pull through this change, we'll either have to
change the URLs of the old WDs (doesn't sound smart), cheat and
somehow fiddle in the old WDs into the document history of the
renamed document (I'm sure that's painful and brittle), or abandon
the current RegTAP strand and start a new RelReg one (will look like
a failed attempt and confuse people).

There are also some other, minor annoyances.

So, I'd rather not make this change for purely aesthetic reasons, as
it has fairly profound technical implications.

Would anyone be severely annoyed if I just put down something like
"For historical reasons, the short name of the specification of the
Relational Registry is RegTAP." in the introduction and just left the
name as it is?

Cheers,

        Markus