[Esip-discovery] proposed mechanism for version identification

[Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)]

Here is the proposed way for identifying a given discovery service with an ESIP Discovery convention version.

> (1) The ESIP Discovery Version with which a provider complies would be identified by declaring an ESIP namespace within the root element of the document, i.e.:
> a)  the <feed> element for Atom responses
> b)  the <OpenSearchDescription> element for OpenSearch Description documents
> 
> (2) Note that (b) forces an OSDD to contain descriptions for only one version of the spec. However, this is a feature in that a given ESIP specification version may affect the OSDD structure and contents themselves.
> 
> (3) The namespace prefix shall by convention be "esip".  
> 
> (4) The namespace URI shall be http://commons.esipfed.org/ns/discovery/<version>/.
> 
> (5) Thus, the opening element for an ESIP-compliant atom feed may look like:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>  <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" 
>        xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
>        xmlns:esip="http://commons.esipfed.org/ns/discovery/1.2/">
> 
> The namespace URI will be dereferencible to the text describing the ESIP discovery conventions for that version.
> 

Any comments
--
Dr. Christopher Lynnes     NASA/GSFC, Code 610.2    phone: 301-614-5185