Welcome to the Registry Webapp Documentation.
The Registry web application implements the full IVOA interface along with other helpful pages to help query and update the Registry and harvest external IVOA registries.
Look at the installation page (on the left menu) to install the Registry to your servlet container such as tomcat.
Once installed all the documentation, query, updating, harvesting web application pages will be located on your local site. After installation you will need to continue with the Configuration page to set particular properties up for your registry. Once configuration is done you will have an IVOA compliant Registry to use.

More about Registries:
The IVOA registries for a distributed network on the internet. Registries periodically replicate data between themselves in a process known as "harvesting". So registries contain effectively two classes of information;

  • The resources that have been entered directly into that registry - i.e. these resources are 'owned' by the registry.
  • the resources that the registry has harvested from the other registries that it knows about.

The resources that a registry 'owns' are separated from the other resources by belonging to a particular set of authority identifiers, which provide a namespace.
The decision about whether it is necessary to install a registry depends on whether you have permission to add resources at a particular registry - i.e. if the curator of a registry is prepared to allow you to enter resources in their registry then it might not be necessary to install a registry yourself. However, even if you can obtain this permission it can still be advantageous to install a local registry.