PubDIDs (and DIDs in general, maybe)

[Arnold Rots]

Hm, I'm not happy about dropping fragments, since they feature prominently
in the persistent identifiers that have been issued by data publishers under
the authority of the ADS. And persistent means persistent. So they are not
going away.

The format is: ivo://ADS/<Publisher>#<InternalToPublisher>

See, for instance:
http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/cda/datasetid.html
http://aas.org/data-sets/formatting-data-sets-aas-submissions
http://aas.org/data-sets/participating-data-centers

The <Publisher> tags are issued by the ADS.
The data publishers provide the ADS with URLs to resolve the URIs
and the fragment allows the publishers to organize their holdings in
their own fashion.


Cheers,

  - Arnold

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arnold H. Rots                                          Chandra X-ray
Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                   tel:  +1 617 496
7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                                      fax:  +1 617
495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138
arots at cfa.harvard.edu
USA
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 7:54 AM, Markus Demleitner <
msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> Dear Registry and DAL,
>
> First, apologies for crossposting *again*, but somehow the "IVORNs
> in DAL protocols" theme is haunting me quite a bit these days.
>
> With the upcoming datalink standard, our dataset identifiers, in
> particular the publisher dataset identifiers, will gain importance,
> as the protocol's primary parameter will typically be the PubDID.
> I hence believe this would be the perfect time to give some Good
> Advice (or "Best Practice" if you prefer) on how these should look
> like, in particular with a view to Norman's note at
>
> http://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/URIFragments/index.html
>
> (the TL;DR of which is: Don't use URI fragment identifiers -- the
> things behind a # -- to reference separate resources).
>
> To outline the problem for newcomers: SSA, ObsCore and probably some
> others have the concept of dataset identifiers that are supposed to be
> IVORNs (i.e., URIs with an ivo:// scheme).  These IVORNs in turn are
> supposed to resolve in a registry.  Of course, you cannot and should not
> register all your images (or whatever).  Hence, the plan is to register
> data collections (or abuse, e.g., the authority record) as "roots" for
> the DIDs and add "local parts" after a stop character, i.e., a magic
> character that says "split here and only resolve what's before me
> in the registry".
>
> The current IVOA Indentifiers REC (v. 1.12) defines two stop characters,
> the # and the ?.  For one reason or another, current PubDIDs lean
> towards using the # (disclaimer: this is anecdotal based on what I've
> seen while doing other things), which leads to PubDIDs somewhat like
>
>  [*]ivo://dc.g-vo.org#myGigaAndromedaCube.fits
>
> or
>
>  [*]ivo://dc.g-vo.org/services/gigacubes#andromeda
>
> or somesuch, where the [*] is supposed to indicate deprecation, since
> after Norman's note, that practice should clearly be phased out.
>
> This leaves the ? stop character, which, I suppose, is suitable
> according to our own IVORN rules as well as rules for URIs in general.
> There are, however, still some free parameters in building the DIDs, and
> I can imagine quite a few scenarios where having conventions in
> the DIDs might be useful or even really useful.
>
> One of those is:
>
> (a) should we have HTTP-URL-like keyword-value pairs after the stop
> char or just the path?
>
> That is, should the new PubDIDs look like
>
>   ivo://dc.g-vo.org?did=gigaAndromedaCube
>
> or do we just dump the path like this:
>
>   ivo://dc.g-vo.org?gigaAndromedaCube
>
> There's something to be said for both options (the second is more
> straightforward and simpler, the first lets us encode other semantics
> in the keyword if we need it) -- opinions?
>
> Even if you don't see a need or can't be bothered to put your opinion
> into words, you could help me by replying to me personally, checking one
> of the following boxes (I'll summarize on-list if I get votes):
>
> [ ] with did=x    [ ] just the local identifier
> [ ] should be left to the publisher   [ ] undecided
>
>
> (b) Should there be recommendations or even requirements for the base
> URI?  One thing that has come up now and then is to require that the
> resources they resolve to are datalink services (if we want those in the
> registry at all) or at least should have some relationship to a
> service that allows access to the dataset referred to.
>
> Again, if you'd like do vote:
>
> [ ] require relation    [ ] leave open   [ ] forbid
> [ ] undecided
>
>
> (c) Based on my own doubts when I had to come up with various PubDID
> schemes in my resources, I do believe this Good Advice should be made
> explicit in a prominent place.  I believe two paragraphs would do, so
> something like a non-normative sidebar would do just fine.  Probably
> even an appendix would be overdoing it.
>
> The question is: where could that reside?  A natural place would be
> the Identifiers REC, but I don't see anyone taking that up any time
> soon (though I'd argue that removing the XML form of identifiers
> would be a positive move).  An alternative would be datalink close to
> the introduction of the ID parameter, where it could illustrate what
> kind of value there'd typically be in that parameter.  Or, we could
> expand what one of obscore, SSAP, or SIAv2 have to say about their
> DIDs.  For the record, I'd like a sidebar in datalink most (but I
> acknowledge the desire to keep that document short).
>
> So, the options to me look like this:
>
> [ ] Identifiers REC   [ ] Datalink   [ ] Next available DAL Spec
> [ ] Obscore  [ ] I want a Note on this   [ ] Oh, just leave it alone
>
>
> Did I miss something DID-wise?
>
> And I suggest to keep the discussion of this topic entirely on the
> DAL list rather than keeping it on both lists.  I submit persons on
> the Registry list interested in this but not on the DAL list should
> be sufficiently alerted to a possible discussion by this initial mail.
>
> Thanks,
>
>        Markus
>
>
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