[Quality] another can of worms

Hi all

I've been wondering what to do about quality, and how to describe it.

We have a general one - if we allow anyone to publish to the VO, how do we describe a datacenter's quality? There are datacenters setup for a sky survey, with all the processing involved that has been set up by teams of astronomers (presumably?) double checking each other. And there is data published by a small group or an individual so that people can access it, but which has not gone through such a rigorous set of tests.   We don't really want a general query to the registry returning both as 'equals value' (or do we?).

We also have a smaller scale one - each item of data may need to be marked. For example, a sky survey may have items that have been marked as 'possibly satellite track' or 'instrument feature' (is that the word? such as diffraction spikes?)

It's surfaced occasionally in some groups as a 'placeholder' but doesn't seem to have been dealt with in itself. Has anyone come up with a framework (I can't find a general one)? If not, where do we start? Is a 'placeholder' sufficient for all three groups (dal/dm/registry) to start with?

I've posted this across all three groups for discussions about quality and what it means/implies on a large scale. Obviously it should split down when it becomes more specific! Such as whether [Quantity] should include [Quality] as well as [Error]; and whether this is the same [Quality] as that attached to a dataset... :-)

Cheers,

Martin

-- 
Software Engineer
AstroGrid @ ROE
Tel: +44 7901 55 24 66
www.astrogrid.org