[glue-wg] Publishing annotations

[Burke, S (Stephen)]

Hi,

I don't know if this has been discussed already, or is considered in
scope, but I was just thinking about whether you could have a way for a
third party to publish "annotations" to glue schema objects. The
specific thing I was considering was the EGEE "freedom of choice" tool,
which currently edits the published data by removing
AcessControlBaseRule attributes for CEs which are failing defined tests.
That works, but it isn't entirely satisfactory in that it isn't
transparent, you can't tell that the published data has been modified or
who did it (or indeed why). On the face of it it would be better to do
this kind of thing explicitly, so you could see where the modifications
were coming from and choose whether to use them or not.

  Another thing that occurs to me on similar lines is the downtime
information. I see that this is now embedded in the Endpoints, but for
EGEE that wouldn't be usable because our downtime information is in a
central database (GOC DB), so if we wanted to publish it it would again
need to be done by modifying/annotating published information from a
different place.

  This could maybe also feed into our CESEBind discussion, e.g. rather
than the CE and SE publishing disconnected pieces of information the CE
could in effect add/modify things published by the SE, i.e. we could
separate the schema structure from the question of who publishes it.

  What do people think? Maybe it's too complicated to fit in at this
stage, but it might be worth a bit of thought - at the abstract schema
level it wouldn't necessarily mean huge changes. Just thinking about it
quickly I suspect the problems would come at the implementation level,
e.g. in LDAP the annotations would still be in a different part of the
tree so it would take some extra effort in queries to find them.

Stephen