[MOBY-dev] what are services LSIDs good for?

[Tom Oinn]

Martin Senger wrote:
>>We are planning to keep version numbers of services
>>
> 
>    Good. Please keep in mind my suggestion *not* to return WSDL as service
> data (I told it to Eddie already in Malaga; there is no sense to duplicate
> this feature if we have it already in registry API) but returns instead a
> fingerprint of data that are registered. So if a provider re-register the
> LSID changes and people can se that a new version of a service is there.

Should there be anything returned as LSID data for a service? A service 
is an abstract entity, it doesn't have a physical existance so it's 
meaningless (according to the LSID specification) to return data for it. 
Something like a protein sequence has a real world entity which can have 
various literal representations (hence having an abstract root sequence 
object which referes in the metadata to various concrete LSIDs for each 
format) but in this case there is no real world object.

LSIDs for services should only return metadata, they shouldn't return 
data in any form whatsoever. If you want to return metadata pointing to 
a servicedescription LSID (or whatever) and have the data for the 
servicedescription be a WSDL that would sound reasonable but the service 
itself is an abstract entity. It would be exactly as reasonable to 
return a bitmap image of the server hardware...

Tom