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IVOA Resource Registry Working Group Home
Contents
Current Activity
Standards Evolution
The following pages collect ideas, new features, specification bugs, and the like for our current standards:
What is it?
A review article on the registry says: "[T]he Registry provides the mechanism with which users and applications discover and select resources -- typically, data and services -- that are relevant for a particular scientific problem."
The Registry is the data source feeding numerous in-application interfaces (e.g., the information you get in TOPCAT's VO service selectors gets pulled from the Registry) as well as some dedicated Registry clients (see the "Browse the Registry" section on the IVOA Software page..
The Registry is built from data provided by the publishers, who define a rich set of metadata for their services and put that up on publishing registries. Operators of searchable registries pull that information regularly and run interfaces to query it. Put succinctly: The Registry is what brings data publishers and data users together.
How do I use it?
You probably already have -- VO applications letting you search for services or perform all-VO searches build on Registry content. For more demanding discovery work, you can use several interfaces, e.g., GAVO's WIRR (which includes a SAMP interface to pass on discovered resources to desktop clients) or the more google-like US-VAO Searchable Registry at STScI. Also see the "Browse the Registries" part of the IVOA application directory.
For programmatic access, you will want a TAP client (with sync querying, which should be plenty enough for Registry queries, generic HTTP libraries will do) and skim over the RegTAP standard.
How do I get in?
This is a longer story; see GettingIntoTheRegistry.
How We Operate and How to Join
We coordinate our activities as a Working Group of the IVOA; apart from this wiki and the VO-wide version control system Volute, our main means of communication is the Registry WG's mailing list; you can subscribe and inspect archives from our mailing list landing page.
The most visible output of the RWG are the specification documents. For us, these govern how IVOA registries operate both between themselves and toward data providers and data users; they are what lets all sorts of clients work with services operated by different parties, and what lets the searchable registries easily obtain information from many different publishers.
The most useful output of this group are the actual implementations of the specifications. See the links below for how to find some if you need to or head for the Registry of Registries right away..
All interested are welcome to participate in any of the our activities. Here are some things you can do to "join" the working group (listed roughly from easiest to hardest):
- Subscribe to the registry mailing list and participate in the discussion.
- Create a TWiki Login for yourself so that you provide comments on specification documents.
- Make text contributions to ongoing specification document authoring, or volunteer to take up editorship of a new spec.
- Get involved in a registry-related application development project. This might either be an implementation of a registry itself or an application that uses registries.
Participants
Membership of this working group is informal as people and projects come and go. See above for information on how to 'join' the working group. Basically: If you want to be part of the RWG, you are. |