Registry Ops (and library devs) RofR and validation efforts

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi all,

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 09:09:30PM +0000, Theresa Dower wrote:
> As the maintainer of the NAVO searchable registry, I'm making a
> push in March to finish up outstanding issues we've had, and I'm
> happy to work with folks running other registries on RofR errors in
> other registries. Menelaus Perdikas, while not normally working on
> VO tasks, has also volunteered his help, and can take a better look
> at the RofR validator itself.  Hopefully we can also get some

If I may have a wish: It would be great if the RofR validator grew a
mode "use document-declared schemas".

The background is that in order to provide implementation experience,
I usually add records containing features of standards in development
to my registry records.  These then will, of course, no longer
validate against the published schemas; see

http://rofr.ivoa.net/regvalidate/HarvestValidater?endpoint=http%3A//dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/oai.xml

for an example.  This is generally not an operational problem, as by
our Note on Schema Versioning XML consumers should just ignore
unknown elements and attributes, and registry harvesters have
traditionally done just that.

Now, I provide updated schemas in these documents' schemaLocation
attributes, and if they don't validate against these, that might
indicate errors that will cause operational problems.  So, it'd be
great if such issues weren't swamped by errors flagged for new
constructs.

I think this would be fairly straightforward in implementation: you'd
just disable the custom schema resolver pointing to your internal
schemas conditioned on the state of a checkbox to the URL form.  To
keep the load on the docrepo down, I'd say the "use built-in schemas"
mode should still be the default.

Thanks,

           Markus