Authority ID

An Authority ID is a string that identifies an organisational unit.

It is used by the registry maintenance services to identify who is allowed to change a registry entry; only the people registered as owners of a particular authorityID may change registry entries bearing that authority ID.

A data centre might have several different authority IDs to enable them to farm out the management of resource identifiers to groups of people.

There are no set rules for the form that authority ID strings should take - administrators are free to choose their own as long as (1) they are globally unique and (2) they comply with the relevant IVOA specification:

http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IVOAIdentifiersV11Disc/Identifiers-20050302.html

To ensure global uniqueness, basing your authority ID at least in part on your organisation's internet domain is probably a good idea.

We have set up a few authority IDs for our early deployers to use, as shown below. The "Managing registry" here is the registry in which the authority ID is stored, and in which all applications running under that authority ID should be initially registered.

-- KonaAndrews - 16 Mar 2005