Description
On the status attribute, the schema currently explains:
active
: resource is believed to be currently maintained, and its description
is up to date (default).
inactive
: resource is apparently not being maintained at the present.
This at least insinuates that this attribute would be managed by someone else than the publisher. That does not happen in the current VO, and we don't have facilities for that, either. I think we should be clear that the publisher manages these attributes, perhaps like this:
active
: The resource is (normally) available and actively maintained.
inactive
: The resource is temporarily offline but is expected to resume operations at some later date; publishers in this case could publish an estimate when that will happen in a date element with a role of Available.
deleted
: This status could be used for resources permanently unavailable if VOResource metadata should still be available via OAI-PMH; in the current VO, there is probably no reason to ever do that.
While we are on the topic, we should probably also say a few words on what "inactive" is supposed to do, perhaps in an admonition box saying something like:
The VOResource status attribute somewhat overlaps with OAI-PMH's idea of the record's life cycle. In particular, at least when VOResource metadata is consumed through RegTAP, there is no difference between setting status to deleted over publishing an oai:deletedRecord for the identifer; but the former will let you keep publish VOResource metadata \emph{through OAI-PMH}, which the latter does not because oai:deletedRecords do not admit oai:metadata elements.However, there is no use case for that in the current VO, and hence publishers should use exclusively use deleted records on the OAI-PMH level rather than set status to deleted.
Having a status of inactive will again purge the metadata from RegTAP instances and hence will not look differently to VO users. Operators may want to use that status code internally, however, to temporarily hide malfunctioning services without deleting their records from internal metadata stores.