illegal/unrecommended use of IVOA identifiers

From: Ray Plante <rplante-at-poplar.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 01:06:30 -0600 (CST)


Hi John et al.

I don't know if this has been pointed out to you or not; however, the Plastic Specification is using IVOA identifiers in a non-standard way to identify its messages.

The IVOA Identifiers specification
(http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/IDs.html) states that the
use of the ivo indicates that the identifier has been registered with an IVOA registry (section 3.2.2).

To be compliant, each of the Plastic message identifiers would have to be registered as a separate resource. While in principle this is possible, this is highly discouraged. Instead, I would recommend the approach that is to be used by the VOSpace standard in which names are identified using a # suffix; e.g.,

    ivo://votech.org/plastic#info/getIVORN

For use of an identifier of this form to be compliant, only the ivo://votech.org/plastic resource need be registered. We have a new schema we are putting forward for this purpose called VOStandard
(http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/RegUpgradeSummer2006/VOStandard-v0.1.xsd).
It defines two new Resource sub-classes, Standard and StandardService, that registers the existance of a standard; the former is probably most appropriate for Plastic. These types do not currently provide metadata for defining what I might call properties (e.g. info/getIVORN); however, we should probably add that. Note that the standard being described need not be an IVOA standard.

Please let me know if you have any comment or suggestions on this front. The Registry WG is the WG that handles the Identifier standard.

cheers,
Ray Received on 2006-11-06Z08:12:37