VO registry in practice- we have another small problem

[Sarah Weissman]

(Apologies for any weirdness with formatting. The ability to quote email properly appears to have been removed from the latest version of Outlook for Mac.)

On 5/29/17, 4:44 AM, "registry-bounces at ivoa.net on behalf of Markus Demleitner" <registry-bounces at ivoa.net on behalf of msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:


    > However, a lot of catalogs are splitted in various tables which have their
    > own coverage. For instance I show below the Gaia DR1 catalog, and its 6
    > tables with the associated MOCs.
    
    Because authors (and other metadata) differ greatly between these six
    tables, I'd say they should be registered separately in the first
    place; there's a clear discovery use case that you would, for
    instance, expect the Cepheid data to come up when you look for
    variable stars, but DR1 clearly not.
    
    There's nothing wrong with having a Gaia DR1 data record (perhaps
    with a table schema comprising all tables and an auxiliary TAP
    capability), which is then linked with HasPart relationships to the
    individual resources.  But that should, at least by the discovery
    scenario test, not be the primary means of discovery.
    
Maybe everyone is already aware of it, but I thought it might be useful to link to this document (although Markus is one of the authors, so maybe he has a good reason for not linking to it) http://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/DataCollect/20160108/NOTE-discovercollections-1.0-20160108.html. I just recently ran into the issue of distinguishing auxiliary capability records from main ones when we were preparing the new faceted search for the MAST VO registry (http://vao.stsci.edu/keyword-search/). From what I can tell from diving into the records in our registry, people are using the aux/main distinction to register separate resources for sub-collections, particularly for TAP services, although it has not been uniformly adopted.

Maybe we need to organize some kind of registry metadata hack day with the goal of improving resource metadata to make it more useful for application developers?

-Sarah