VOResource-1.2 Proposed Recommendation: Request for Comments

VOResource is an IVOA standard for describing astronomical resources (data collections, services, registries, tools...) within the Virtual Observatory. It provides an XML interchange format for use with registries, and lays the foundations upon which description schemes for concrete resources are built in various VOResource extensions.

Here is a brief summary of the changes from Recommendation 1.1:

• You can now use DOIs (or other identifier schemes like orcid) wherever we have a ResourceName so far, which includes relationship, authors, and the like.

• We now spell out what "using the UAT" for our subject keywords mean. If you publish resource records, this probably means that you will have to update them, as it is unlikely that they already have UAT keywords, let alone the with the right syntax.

• If you machine-readably declare your licenses, you should now use SPDX URIs.

• The bibliographic source can now be declared machine-readably with DOIs, too (before, there were only bibcodes).

Latest version of VOResource-1.2 can be found at:

• https://ivoa.net/documents/VOResource/20241015/index.html

Reference Interoperable Implementations

UAT keywords have been in use at GAVO and VizieR for a long time now; see also Sembarebro for a proof-of-concept-level interface using it.

To get an idea for why data providers should take up SPDX URIs, see a query that returns data distributed under CC0 (you should, really):

select ivoid from rr.resource
where rights_uri ILIKE 'https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html'

Relationships using altIdentifier are available from VizieR (Gilles?).

All of the previous items do not need any special software support.

For the ResourceName change, that is not the case. To make it useful, RegTAP will need an update, presumably adding alt_identifier columns to res_role and relationship, and res_details keys for facility and instrument. For the Heidelberg RegTAP server, this ought to happen during December 2025.

Implementations Validators

Basic validation is through any XML schema validator. If unsure, see the Makefile from the source repository for how to use stilts to validate your instance documents.

The RofR validator should be updated soon.

Comments from the IVOA Community during RFC/TCG review period: 2024-11-15 - 2024-12-31

The comments from the TCG members during the RFC/TCG review should be included in the next section.

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Comments from TCG member during the RFC/TCG Review Period: 2024-11-15 - 2024-12-31

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