Writing Registry Records for IVOA Standards

Authors of IVOA standards which use IVOIDs (for instance, to reference capability identifiers) must submit registry records for their documents, and authors of IVOA standards without IVOIDS should as well. This page tries to guide you through this process.

StandardarsRegExt allows the tracking of the IVOA documents process, including notes, working drafts and proposed recommendations. In practice, at this point we rely on the web-based IVOA document repository for this, and the Registry is (almost) exclusively concerned with finished recommendations.

Starting a Record from Scratch

The format of the registry record is prescribed by StandardsRegExt, but trying to work through that document and all the prerequisites just to write a record for your standard would be overkill.

Rather, start from a template that is provided as part of the ivoatex authoring system.

A filled-out example (albeit a bit artificial, since ivoatexDoc is just a Note) is part of ivoatexDoc, as a file with extension .vor.

If working with ivoatex in the recommended way, authors should thus automatically have their standards record under version control (see the ivoatex documentation for details). Even if you don't use ivoatex for authoring, you can still start from the template given there by saying:

9svn copy ivoatex/stdrec-template.xml ExampleStandard.vor

Validating the Record

You should validate the record you have written before submitting it. The template contains all the declarations that should allow an XML schema validator to work.

If you do not have a working XML schema validator locally, we recommend just using an online service. At the time of writing, https://www.corefiling.com/opensource/schemaValidate.html seems to work nicely. You do not have to select an XML Schema, just upload your file as XML Instance (privacy-conscious users are advised that they need to enable referrer sending for that site).

XML schema is not a great standard, and so the error messages may be a bit cryptic. If you need help, ask over on registry@ivoa.net.

Submitting the Record

Send the finished record in an email attachment to ivoa-rofr@cfa.harvard.edu

Updating the record

On updating, please make sure that you have updated:

• Resource/@updated
• creator if there are new/different authors/editors (by IVOA convention, editors should be at the start of the author list)
• curation/date[@role="update"]
• the abstract
• endorsedVersion, including its status.