VOResource 1.1 RFC

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi Baptiste,

On Wed, Jun 07, 2017 at 05:30:38PM +0200, Baptiste Cecconi wrote:
> The Creator and Contact of VOResource elements both include an
> ivo-id attribute to be used for referring to contact/creator
> details already declared in the registry. This is also present in
> the VOEvent data model and it could be useful in many other cases.
> This allows to keep track of personal detail changes (email,
> phone???) in existing resources without editing the resource
> itself. I couldn't find any real-world implementation of this
> VOResource feature. Any example out there? I'm interested to see
> how to declare such a resource. 

That's a nice little exercise in writing RegTAP queries:

select distinct base_role 
from rr.res_role 
where role_ivoid is not NULL

If you actually run this (e.g., on http://reg.g-vo.org/tap), you'll
see that indeed the only base_roles with @ivo-id set is publisher and
contributor (and the contributor ones are flukes that arguably are
bugs in my RegTAP ingestion logic; the RegTAP queries to figure this
out are left as an exercise to the reader).

The valid cases reference vr:Organisation records. Support for these
has been part of VOResource from the start.

And indeed, there is no vr:Person (or, in line with current efforts
in the DM WG, perhaps vr:Party), and apparently nobody has, so far,
bothered to experiment with such a thing.

> This is already implemented in other registries (such as SPASE for
> instance). It would be a charge to the naming authority to maintain
> its own Person-VOResource descriptors, but I think this is fully
> acceptable.

It would actually be a really minor change -- we'd just define
another vr:Resource subtype.  Sure, title, curation, and content (the
mandatory metadata elements of vr:Resource) might come a bit odd for
that type (is a person's name their title?  I refuse the temptation
to crack jokes about curation/creator and content/type), but that's
nothing a few carefully chosen words in the type's documentation
couldn't fix.

But I'm not sure such a resource type would actually be widely used.
I have to admit I'm not familiar at all with SPASE, but before going
ahead with anything like this I'd like to hear their experiences and
use cases.

So, unless many people speak up now they've been waiting for such a
thing I'd lean towards not putting anything like it in VOResource
1.1.  If there's a modicum of interest, there's nothing wrong with
prototyping an extension (VOParty, say), put in a few records and see
how it goes.  It would work just as well, but if it turns out nobody
is registering themselves or that the records aren't used, VOResource
isn't burdened with an extra feature for the remaining 1.x series.

        -- Markus