He has been stressing to users that the new service will not be imposing any structure on the information in the catalog, but that users will be free to set up their catalog entries in whatever way is most useful to them. The MSS Group will only be providing tools to help with this process, as well as providing the data connection to actual MSS files in the archive. Erich will keep the committee informed as this project continues. On the subject of the Web-based MSS accounting tools and DCS commands, Erich passed out copies of a first draft of a document describing the goals of this project, and some of the initial ideas he's working on. Most of the rest of the meeting was spent discussing various aspects of the proposal, and trying to reach agreement on several issues.
Anonymous users are anyone else.
It was eventually agreed that initially at least, all access to the Web DCS commands, as well as the MSS accounting tools, would be restricted to registered users only. There will be more discussion on this at future meetings. John brought up the issue of connecting one or more machines at Foothills Lab directly to the MSS Hippi data fabric via the BRAN Network, now that this has been proven to be feasible. Gene is having some ongoing discussions with several system administrators at Foothills Lab about some of the issues that still need to be worked out, and what the next step should be. The latest version of the document describing security and other related issues will be discussed.