Session V:Tools and Management Approaches

From VOiG

1 Introduction
2 Time and Location
3 Presenters
4 Forum
5 Presentation

[edit] Introduction

Each NASA Virtual Observatory (VxO) is a distributed data environment that communicates or will eventually communicate with other VxOs and the entire VxO environment will share some resources of which the most important one is the metadata. Creation of SPASE data descriptions is a wide-spread effort that is akin to Open Source Software (OSS) development. Complex OSS projects, e.g. the Linux kernel, rely on the network of trust, where the lead developers trust a limited number of skilled developers, those in turn have their own trusted collaborators and so on. It is apparent that the VxO development is in many ways similar and the VxO teams should consider employing tools and/or processes that facilitate efficient development. As a particular example, we will focus the presentation on discussing metadata exchange, creation and the need for using a revision management system. We will argue that distributed repositories, e.g. git, are more suitable for VxOs than centralized systems (CVS, Subversion, ...).