This document clarifies the policies of the CORES Project with regard to the persistence of the CORES Registry beyond the formal end of the project on 30 June 2003.

The CORES Registry consists of:

• a software package for creating and indexing schemas ("Registry Software");
• a set of source schemas created -- in most cases -- by the schema creation tool ("Registry Sources"); and
• an aggregate index of the data content of the set of schemas, which has been made accessible for browsing and searching through a Web interface ("Web Interface and Registry Server").

These three components, largely independent from each other, entail different commitments with regard to persistence.

1. Persistence of the Web Interface and the Registry Server

Two of the CORES partners -- UKOLN and SZTAKI -- are committed to maintain the registry server and its Web Interface online at the address http://cores.dsd.sztaki.hu/ for at least one year (i.e., through June 2004) within the limits of hardware and software resources as of the project end.

UKOLN and SZTAKI will perform periodic checks of the content of the database and reserve the right to remove data that is considered inappropriate for the registry.

A second registry server and interface is provided as a "sandbox" registry for testing and training at http://cores.dsd.sztaki.hu/test/ for one year. The provision of the "sandbox" service is liable to interruption at any time and the content of the "sandbox" registry database may be cleared without warning.

2. Availability of the Registry Software

The CORES registry software and schema creation tool are extended and enhanced versions of tools developed by an earlier registry project, MEG. MEG registry software is downloadable under "open source" license conditions from a CVS server at http://cvs.ilrt.org/cvsweb/meg/software/, and CORES registry software will be available from the same CVS server after 30 June 2003. The installation procedure for the CORES software is documented at http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/d22/installation.html.

In principle, any implementor could use this software to establish a registry like that of the CORES Project.

3. Persistence of Registry Sources

The CORES Registry indexes schemas (RDF/XML documents) submitted to the registry server. The Web Interface provides access to this merged index and will continue to do so through 30 June 2004.

As currently designed, however, the registry does not make available the source schemas for the registry in a form independent of the merged index -- i.e., as schema documents in RDF/XML. Responsibility for storing (and making available) copies of the RDF/XML documents themselves therefore lies with the agencies creating and submitting those schemas.

In order to ensure their continued availability, therefore, an agency should make its own schemas available on a Web server and report their URLs to cores-registry@jiscmail.ac.uk. Agencies using the CORES schema creation tool to prepare a schema for submission should first use the File-Save function to store their data in an RDF/XML document.

Through June 2004, UKOLN and SZTAKI will maintain (and if necessary update) a list of pointers to all such source schemas at

http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/schema/

By consulting this list, any implementer could re-index the source schemas using the CORES Registry Software and thereby reconstitute a functional equivalent of the CORES Registry.

The list of schema locations will be maintained only for data submitted to the primary registry. Pointers to schemas submitted to the "sandbox" registry will not be maintained.

For further information, please contact Laszlo Kovacs laszlo.kovacs@sztaki.hu and Rachel Heery r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk

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