[Sea-d-dor] CCSDS - DDOR Operation Pink Book and Quasar catalogue Magenta book - Ready for publication

[Shames, Peter M (312B)]

Dear Mattia, et al,

I was about to send these documents off for CESG review, and was about to say "I've read and approve of them.", when I stumbled over the fact that I had not read the recent version of the Pink Book nor the new Quasar Catalog procedure.  And so I did.

It may be that you will not thank me for this, but I needed to do it and I think the docs will be better for it.  My suggested edits are marked in the attached files.  Many of them relate to alignment with the new Registry Management Policy, but some are quite a bit broader than that.  I've tried to concentrate on the major technical and structural issues, not just editorial ones.  And I have inserted comments, where bold highlights mean it's something that I would really like you to attend to.

Here is a summary of the most important items in my view:

Pink book on DDOR operations

1.       There is the intent to adopt CSS SM specs in the future, but these are not yet ready.  That said, in order to get this book aligned with where those specs are already going I think that you should be using the same sorts of terminology and identifiers that they are.  Failing to do this will mean that your book will potentially be out of sync with theirs for another 5 years.  I do not think that is acceptable.

2.       One implication of this is to request that you bring the book into line with the Registry Management Policy (RMP) that was created to define registries for all of the organizations, contact persons, services, sites, spacecraft, etc that occur in CCSDS standards.  I want to encourage you to adopt these now since otherwise you just have a set of somewhat arbitrary locally defined names for things that are otherwise already listed in standard registries.  There are notes to this effect in the marked up document.

3.       A consequence of this is the recommendation that you change the D-DOR support request parameters to align with these standardized names and identifiers.  I note that for many of these items that you decided to create "short names", of 4 characters in length, for missions, S/C, Quasar, Station, etc.  All of the standard registries use longer name fields.  If you really want to stick to these short names maybe you should request to add them to these standard registries as a new SANA registry update.

4.       The rules for 6.2  DELTA-DOR SUPPORT REQUEST MESSAGE EXCHANGE SPECIFICATIONS are really weakly specified.  They are described, in effect, by examples in sec 6.2.2, sec 6.2.3, and Annex C.  Please see the comments on pg 6-5 in particular.

5.       It may be that you want to continue using the existing spec, it does, after, work.  But I really wonder if you could hand this spec to anyone else who is not "part of the D-DOR Club" and have them successfully implement a request tool or a request parser that would work the first time they try it without a lot of hand holding from the "club".

6.       Perhaps you want to consider a Version 1 spec and a version 2 spec?  Or to just fix this one, and your tools, to be compliant with an improved version?  Now might be a good time to deal with this because otherwise it is likely to be another 5 years.

Magenta Book on DDOR quasar catalogue

1.       This is a brand new document, so the version management (as in item 6 above) is not an issue, but I do recognize that you have established practices.  That said …

2.       There are two major questions that come up for me immediately: how are you going to handle the Ka band catalog and how are you going to handle observation and validation of baselines that do not just include the three DSN stations?

3.       The current catalog registers X-band sources.  I know that you guys are working on a catalog of Ka-band sources.  Is this going to be a separate catalog or just an extension of this catalog?  How does any of this affect the catalog structure, update process, naming, etc?

4.       Do you expect the Ka-Band catalog creation, observations, and update processes to follow what is documented here or is it really different?

5.       The current catalog and descriptions seem to require the use of the three DSN stations to establish flux densities for one or more baselines.  I understand that this has been the practice to date, but is it expected to always be the case?  What if there are a series of JAXA – ESA north / south baseline observations?   Can these other baselines get registered?  How?

6.       All of the same SANA registry issues identified for the Pink Book in items 2 & 3 above apply here as well.  Now is the time to start using the standard registries and to make sure that you are either using them as they are or asking that they be augmented to meet your needs.  The use of submitter (and org) identifiers, station identifiers and location info, etc are examples.

7.       You have been, in effect, assigning unique identifiers to the Quasars in the catalog.  By the simple request for creation of a Quasar OID prefix you would turn these into a globally unique ID that is registered at ISO level.  This is also completely extensible and, by treating at as a qualifier on the whole registry does not require modifying the registry (although there may be other reasons for adding this explicitly to the database.

8.       I do not know if your Ka-band Quasar registry will be just new entries in this registry, or new columns in the registry for Ka-band, or a whole new registry.  I also do not know if it is possible that existing X-band sources will also appear in the Ka-band part.  The use of an ISO OID tied to the actual astronomical source is a fine way to disambiguate this.  The source gets the OID and this can then tie different entries in different catalogs together (if that is how you choose to handle this X- / Ka- issue).

9.       Your procedure essentially states that the D-DOR WG will always exist.  It may not.  I recommend that you think about how you would handle updates to the Quasar catalog if the D-DOR WG is no longer operational.  Assuming that these catalogs become valuable community assets maybe some sort of D-DOR or Quasar catalog expert group would be appropriate?

10.   You talk about catalog contents and catalog submission, but do not even mention any sort of format specs for this.  I think that you could, and should either specify some ASCII format, or use the SANA expert XML format, or work with SANA to define a JSON format.   You could even allow all three, but not having any spec seems dangerous.

11.   Speaking of ISO OIDs and other SANA registries, you really need to make a "SANA Considerations" section of this document, as required in the SANA policy and the RMP.   You have some of the required parts already, they just need to be better organized.

Please let me know if you need to discuss any of this.  We can setup a telecom if need be.  Since this is an SEA document, and the SEA is responsible for the SANA, the RMP, and related matters I think it is essential that these documents be brought into alignment.  And, as I mentioned in an earlier note, we already had a request from the CSS area to ensure that this was done.

Thanks, Peter




From: Mattia Mercolino <Mattia.Mercolino at esa.int>
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 at 2:20 AM
To: Peter Shames <peter.m.shames at jpl.nasa.gov>
Cc: Tom Gannett <tomg at aiaa.org>, James Border <james.s.border at jpl.nasa.gov>, Hiroshi Takeuchi <takeuchi at isas.jaxa.jp>
Subject: CCSDS - DDOR Operation Pink Book and Quasar catalogue Magenta book - Ready for publication

Dear Peter,

As promised during the Plenary last week, we have completed the review and RID disposition of both the books we had to discuss during this Fall meeting, namely:
- The proposed Pink book on DDOR operations
- The proposed Magenta Book on DDOR quasar catalogue update

Given the mostly editorial kind of the received RIDs we think we are in a position to resolve to go for publication of both books

I attach here both documents with track changes and in their clean version, for your review and further processing by the Secretariat.

Kind Regards,

- Pink Book (DDOR operations)



- Magenta Book (DDOR quasar catalogue)

this message and any attachments are intended for the use of the addressee or addressees only.

The unauthorised disclosure, use, dissemination or copying (either in whole or in part) of its

content is not permitted.

If you received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it from your system.

Emails can be altered and their integrity cannot be guaranteed by the sender.



Please consider the environment before printing this email.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.ccsds.org/pipermail/sea-d-dor/attachments/20161104/812ecb7f/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 506x0p11_final-WG-RID-dispositions-20161025-ps.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 485888 bytes
Desc: 506x0p11_final-WG-RID-dispositions-20161025-ps.doc
URL: <http://mailman.ccsds.org/pipermail/sea-d-dor/attachments/20161104/812ecb7f/attachment.doc>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 506x3r1_final_WGedit-20161024-ps.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 617472 bytes
Desc: 506x3r1_final_WGedit-20161024-ps.doc
URL: <http://mailman.ccsds.org/pipermail/sea-d-dor/attachments/20161104/812ecb7f/attachment-0001.doc>