[MOBY-dev] my rash of commits

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all, 

We're nearly back up and running on all cylinders again.  You should be
able to use the expandObjects and expandServices flags in the
findService call to MOBY Central in order to traverse the DAG to find
parent (Object Ontology) or child (Service Ontology) types.  This almost
brings MOBY Central back up to full functionality w.r.t. its behaviour
in service discovery.  The two functions that are still lacking are:

1)  Discovery of services based on Collection type inputs
2)  Retrieval of the XML Schema for an object

This hasn't been 100% tested so please give it a whirl and let me know
if it behaves incorrectly.  Note that traversal of the DAG follows a
single relationship type all the way back to root (or down to leaf), but
*does not* skip from one relationship type to another.  i.e. If I query
MOBY:Central based on object X, and object X HASA object Y, and object Y
ISA object Z, I **WILL NOT** find object Z based on my traversal of the
ontology, since I must follow two different relationship types to get to
it.  I haven't thought about it deeply enough to realize all of the
consequences of this limitation, but it does certainly mean that you may
need to do several queries against the registry if you wish to fully
decompose your object and discover all possible services that could
operate on any sub-component of it.  On the other hand, it seemed
ridiculously difficult to return the full decomposition from a single
call, so this might actually aid the creation of Client programs...??

Anyway, let's try it and see how it goes.

Cheers!

Mark


-- 
Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com>
Illuminae