All, I've just been in a discussion reviewing the OGSA Data Scenarios and some questions arose regarding the OGSA naming services. In particular, we were looking at the replication section of the draft OGSA Data Architecture, which includes the text given below. My first question is: will the first three operations listed below be provided by the OGSA naming activity? To put this very succinctly, will a replica catalog be simply an instance of a resolution service defined by the OGSA-naming WG? My second question is: will the OGSA-naming WG define resolution services that associated arbitrary metadata with names? The reason we ask is that the discussion about RNS/WS-Directory seems to require that a directory service can associate attributes with entries in the directory. If this is so, will the same requirement apply to resolution services for abstract names -> addresses? If these resolution services are managing attributes, do they allow queries over these attributes? If so, what will be the difference between a resolution service and a general registry service or metadata catalog? Here is the text referred to: ------------- The interface to a replica catalogue or replica location service (ReplicaCatalog) may include the following operations: * Operations to create or update mappings between globally unique names and physical addresses for data items * Query operations to discover the physical addresses of data items associated with a globally unique name * Query operations to discover the globally unique name(s) associated with a physical address of a data item * Operations to associate attributes with globally unique names or physical addresses of data items * Query operations to discover globally unique names or physical addresses of data items with specified attributes ---------- Dave Berry Deputy Director, Research & E-infrastructure Development National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street Edinburgh, EH8 9AA +44 131 651 4039