[Moims-dai] Re: Proposed edits to the MACAO Blue Book

[Shames, Peter M (312B)]

Dear Daniele,

I hope this note finds you well, but I suspect that you will not see it until after your summer holidays are past.  I am writing again in hopes that we can at least reach some understanding about how to proceed on this matter of the SANA organization and person registries.    As you know, the existing MACAO document makes no mention of SANA registries, these were created after the fact as a part of setting up the SANA.  Right now there is not even a mention of the SANA in the MACAO, but we do have these on-line registries.

What I proposed was to fix that dis-connect and also to leverage the MACAO registries so that they could be used for other purposes within CCSDS.  Since they do define organiazations and roles, and persons and their roles, this seems natural.  An alternative, of course, is to not do anything to the MACAO documents or the existing SANA registries for the MACAO and to just create new SANA registries that have all of the necessary properties.  If we were to do that then the pressure on the DAI WG to change the MACAO documents would be removed and you could choose, at your own pace, to either adopt the new SANA registries when you were ready or to continue with the existing ones but fix the MACAO documents so that they were properly referenced.

Right now we have three other WG that really need to make reference to some SANA organization and person registries.  The CSS SM WG, the MOIMS Nav WG, and the SOIS APP WG all need to reference registries for organizations and persons.  They started out to create their own, rather poorly specified, organization registires, but I, as SEA AD, asked them to stop and consider the consequences. That is what lead to this current situation, and right now these documents are being held up for lack of a resolution.  The motivation for me is that the CCSDS as a whole would be much better served by one set of well formed registries than by six or more poorly formed ones.

I think that either of the approaches I just mentioned are workable, but in the interest of setting a direction for the SANA as a whole I would like to understand what your preference is and what you think the DAI WG might wish to do.

Would you please take the time to analyze this situation, discuss it with your team, and provide us with an indication of your preference?  If you could do that within the next two weeks, let’s say by the 4’th of September, that would be ideal.  We will then figure out the work plan.

Best regards, Peter




From: Peter Shames <peter.m.shames at jpl.nasa.gov<mailto:peter.m.shames at jpl.nasa.gov>>
Date: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:01 AM
To: Boucon Daniele <Daniele.Boucon at cnes.fr<mailto:Daniele.Boucon at cnes.fr>>
Cc: "moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org<mailto:moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org>" <moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org<mailto:moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org>>
Subject: Proposed edits to the MACAO Blue Book

Dear Daniele,

I hope all is well with you.  I think that during one of our conversations I mentioned that the CESG and the SANA Steering Group (SSG) were looking into the somewhat confusing state of our registries in the SANA.  We have noted that there are a number of issues and overlaps, particularly in the area of organization and person type registries.  The attached presentation,  "CCSDS SSG Name & Number Registries", describes the problem in significant detail and also spells out how we propose to fix it.

The presentaiton "CCSDS Registry Re-engineering" is the best current description of the form of "what" we propose to do.  What we discovered in analyzing the set of CCSDS registries is that there is a set of registries that have to do with the "CCSDS enterprise", the agencies, observers, affiliates, and the people that they appoint to do certain tasks or that have certain roles.  But what we also discovered is that some of these registries are well formed, others less so, but that there were overlaps and gaps.

We have a proposed plan for clearing all of this up.

The reason why I am contacting you as DAI WG chair, is the "how" we propose to do it.  There are several parts to this that need to have CESG review and CMC concurrence.  There is one, in particular, that needs WG concurrence.  In the case of your MACAO Blue Book (CCSDS 630x0b1) we wish to leverage the very good work that has already been done to define and create registries for agencies, and agency sub-elements, and for persons with certain roles.  The proposed extensions add some fields for unique identifiers and also a mechanism for adding new roles for identified persons to allow them to manage other registries than just the MACAO.  This is a request for your WG to review what we have proposed to see if you can concur with the proposed changes which are in the attached mark-up.

The related changes we propose require some related edits to other documents.  I have drafts of all of these prepared and CESG review is just awaiting some final adjustments:

SANA YB (CCSDS 313x0y1, SEA/SSG)
SCID BB (CCSDS 320x0b6, CMC / Secretariat)

And the creation of a new one:

Registry Management Policy (SEA/SSG)

What these changes do is to update the SANA Yellow Book to require WGs to use (or extend) existing registries where that makes sense, and to tell the SANA, in a timely way, when they are creating any new registries or proposing changes to existing registries.  The key registries are those relating to organizations (agency, observer, affiliate) and to persons (with various roles).  The change to the SCID BB is to add a few fields to that spec, including unique object identifiers for spacecraft,  and to extend the current definitions of Agency Representative, the person nominated by an Agency (or Observer) to request changes to the SCID registry.  We want to use the general pattern for "Agency Representative" as the way to manage all persons who are assigned (one or more) roles by their agencies.  Thus one person (AR) might have only one Role (Agency Rep for SCID) or they might have more than one Role (Agency Rep for SCID, Agency Rep for MACAO,  MACAO RP submitter).

After working over these concepts with the SSG, SANA Operator, and CCSDS website team we are convinced that a separate Registry Management Policy will be the best way to approach this overall body of work, so I have prepared a draft of that too.  That still needs some final changes, so I am not sending it now, just the drafts of the SANA, SCID, and MACAO documents and the analysis and re-engineering materials.

I think you will find that the proposed changes do not affect any of the key fields, contents, or intent of what has already been defined in the MACAO.  What they are intended to do it to adopt and extend the existing features so that these core enterprise registries can be re-used, and extended, by others.  Please review these proposed changes with your WG at the earliest opportunity and let us know if there is an issue.  We would all prefer to re-use and extend what is there instead of creating a parallel set of registries, but we can do that if it is deemed necessary.

Very best regards, Peter








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