VoStore current status

[Matthew Graham]

Dave Morris wrote:

> I have written a wiki page which outlines where I think we are with 
> VoStore, and identified some of the things that I think need addressing.
> http://wiki.astrogrid.org/bin/view/Astrogrid/VoStoreADASS2005
>
> This is based on the most recent (pre Kyoto) VoStore specification, 
> plus the results of discussions at the Kyoto conference.
> If this is indeed where we are, then I'll start to fill in some 
> details in the functional definition and the SOAP message schema.
> If I have missed something out, please let me know.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave
>
Hi Dave,

A few things:

- firstly, you say that the specification was split into two components: 
VoSpace and VoSpace - should be VoStore.

- "VoStore? services would provide the lower level storage of objects, 
in a simple flat file space." This sounds like an implementation detail 
and VoStore is just the API spec - whether the underlying storage 
technology is a file system or a database does not matter, the outward 
appearance, however, is as if it is a simple flat file space.

- there is also the issue of how VoStore handles structured (tabulated) 
data: one of the BigIdeas (TM) was that structured and unstructured data 
objects were both first-level components and that as a minimum, both 
would be stored as BLOBs but certain VoStore implementations would have 
the ability to handle structured data objects in a more intuitive 
manner, e.g. load them into a relational db as tables.

- the identifier of an object stored in a VoStore is: <IVOA Identifier 
for VoStore>#<Identifier peculiar to this VoStore> - that way the 
VoStore can be resolved by looking up its identifier in a registry.

- do you mean "xsi:type" instead of  "xsd:type"

- you might also want to include an implementation section: as 
previously mentioned, I have a full Java implementation of the spec: it 
is also fully secure using WS-Security to digitally sign the SOAP 
messages with the user's certificate. We have also successfully tested 
this with a Java client against a .Net server implementation and using 
the NVO SSO prototype.

    Cheers,

    Matthew