connection question

[Peter McCartney]

Hi Matt

we had a planning meeting last week on our data access tool kit and have
decided that there are three kinds of distribution that we mostly likly want
to describe and are trying to figure out how to do it.
These are 

1) direct access information via a url or connection def that is open only
to very restricted individuals (service apps and local lab users for
example)

2) WSDL information about an online service that provides public access to
the data via a web service. used by someone like Don Henshaw who wants to
build a harvesting application for pulling data  automatically from  a
service. over time, we see this as becoming the preferred method for
publishing data as it gives the adminstrator more logging and accounting
control than a direct URL might. 
 
3) a web url that points the user to an interactive site that will walk them
through communication with the web service described in #2. this is the url
that would be distributed with public eml documents and in most cases would
propbably be pointing to the very online data catalog the person is using to
read the EML.


the latter would propbably appear only in eml-dataset/distribtion . my only
choice for function is download or information. We're not sure either is
fully explanatory since its not direct download,  but will give you the data
with some interaction that cannot be automated. 

the first is pretty much covered in the current content model

the second is a bit unclear to us. a simple wsdl might tell you to go to
send a soap message to x.x.edu with the paramters datasetID, entityID, etc,
but could be a very elaborate one with lots of methods for different
retrival functions and processing options. We could stick the wsdl in
additionalMetadata or are considering publishing it as a uddi and then just
putting the url to the uddi entry in the URL field. But if we did that,
shouldnt we have a better function flag than "information" since this is
informtion that conforms to a structured standard (WSDL)?
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