Standards in the RofR

[Markus Demleitner]

Yulie,

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 11:23:26AM -0400, Zografou, Panagoula wrote:
> In Registry Interfaces 1.1 paragraph 4.1 I see the following:
> 
> "The Registry of Registries also contains the canonical VOResource
> descriptions of the most recent versions of VOResource standards and
> extensions themselves, which are of type vstd:Standard. "
> 
> This is correct in principle but the contents of this set in the RofR are
> out-of date.

Yes, we, as a community, have been bad at doing this.  Of course
StandardsRegExt was a fairly late addition to our standards
portfolio, too.  In an ideal world, the IVOA docrepo page would be
generated from the registry record, and things would automatically be
up to date.

In the real world, that's probably not going to happen for a long
while yet. Perhaps given that the docrepo page is mantained manually,
having a StandardsRegExt record isn't even *terribly* urgent for
standards that don't use their standard id.

> I am thinking that it would be the responsibility of the working group that
> produces a standard to submit a new document to the RofR and this can be
> done by mail to ivoa-rofr at cfa.harvard.edu. If you agree, can people that
> can post to the various working groups please fwd this mail, I do not think
> I can. Also if you know that there are other groups responsible for not
> registered standards please include them and possibly make a wider
> announcement to let all groups know about future standards registration.

In principle, yes.  But we cannot really ask hapless standards
authors to write a Registry record, what with its numerous namespaces
and other traps.

What I believe we[1] should do:

(1) Write one or two template records and add them to ivoatex (of
course, they'd be intended for use outside of ivoatex, too).
Essentially, all the authors need to do is copy the template, fill
out what's variable, and submit it (preferably maintaining their
document in version control, too).

(2) Write a little wiki page with a couple of sentences on the why
and how of filling out these templates, including instructions of
where to send them.

(3) Send out a notification that there's now this howto to
interop at ivoa.net.

(4) For all non-responsive standards authors, come up with standards
records from our side.  That's not *terribly* much work, but still
noticeable.  I imagine I could do a record before going home on quiet
days or so, so some load sharing would be really nice.

(5) Agree with the document coordinator to give the authors and us a
heads-up when a new standard is out, at least at the REC level (I
don't think we need to follow the review process in the Registry in
typical cases).

Opinions?  Or better even, voluteers?

    -- Markus


[1] As in: "Don't ask what the Registry WG can do for you, ask what
you can do for the Registry WG"