I like to think of it this way: Bob's right, Tony's right and Matthew is
right. Now let's go an have a beer or three!
Seriously, the Registry is a way to discover resources. Tick for Bob's argument. If a VO project chooses to keep it to that, good for them. However, a different VO project might choose to extend the Registry to hold additional information. Tick for Tony. Provided these two different registry implementations can exchange the mandatory minimum data to harvest each other, there is no problem. Data Dictionary: the single best place to provide metadata about a resource is with the service that serves up that resource. Tick for Matthew (the "Data Dictionary infrastructure" turns out to be the collective, distributed metadata provided by each service, the mechanisms for providing which are being discussed elsewhere). Everything else is an implementation detail - and we're good at that.
Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but where's the problem?
> I'm inclined to agree with Bob. We invented the registry as an
> alternative to UDDI, which did not do exactly what we wanted, for
> resource discovery and not as a generic metadata store. As I have said
> before, we can overload the registry concept and use the existing
> infrastructure (plus some epicyclic extensions) to provide general
> metadata stores or we can separate these and keep the registry simple
> and create a different kind of infrastructure for the data dictionary
> stuff.
Keith.
-- Keith Noddle Phone: +44 (0)116 223 1894 AstroGrid Project manager Fax: +44 (0)116 252 3311 Dept of Physics & Astronomy Mobile: +44 (0)7721 926 461 University of Leicester Email: ktn-at-star.le.ac.uk Leicester, UK LE1 7RH Web: http://www.astrogrid.orgReceived on 2007-05-08Z18:54:25