[MOBY-dev] The Agent behaviour - discussion and questions to the MOBY community

[Mark Wilkinson]

Issue #1:
-------------
Well, along with the rest of you, I got an inbox full of threatening
emails from the agent yesterday.  Ugh!  Sorry about that!

So, the first-try of the agent was possibly a bit of a disaster w.r.t.
public relations, but we did learn from it, and we're re-coding it now
to have a less annoying behaviour!

History:  The primary purpose of the agent is to enable a distributed
and safe way to add/update/remove your services from the registry.  At
present, services registered without a SignatureURL can be removed by
anyone, which is quite a dangerous situation.  For this reason, we
encourage people to now download their Service Signature RDF from the
page that Eddie has set up at
http://mobycentral.icapture.ubc.ca/servlets/forms/getSignatureForm and
save the output to whatever URL you enter in the Signature URL box.
This will protect your service from deregistration by third-parties.  If
you need to deregister your service, simply remove its description from
the RDF document, and the agent will remove it from the registry the
next time it crawls.  [[More about this in Issue #2 below...]]

Another behaviour of the agent is its (configurable) ability to
"cleanse" the registry of any service that do not have a SignatureURL.
The assumption was that "dead" services would likely not have
SignatureURLs, and that any service that was intended to be production-
quality would have been registered with a SignatureURL so those without
could/should be removed.  This became a part of the draft policy
statement for my instance of MOBY Central
(http://mobycentral.icapture.ubc.ca/MOBYCentral_Policy.html).   

I've had complaints about this policy from several of the key MOBY
partners, and they have convinced me to loosen this policy to be less
"tyrannical", and in the process we have come up with an alternative
proposal that I wish to put forward to the community.

My concern with the way people use the main public registry has been
that people tend to leave their "trash" lying around in there for, in
some cases, years!  This clutters-up the search results of other people
and is generally quite a nuisance.  However, if we agree that services
with a SignatureURL are "production quality" and that services without a
SignatureURL are "test", then it is still possible to filter-out these
"test" services at the client-level, while allowing them to persist in
the registry for people to use and experiment with until they are ready
to re-register them with a SignatureURL.

i.e. the new policy proposal is that services without a SignatureURL can
remain in the main public registry; however it is up to the client
whether or not these services are displayed in the search results.

Does this sound more reasonable to everyone?

If so, I will update the policy statement, and we can make a note of
this "convention" in the API documentation as well.

===============

Issue #2:  Immediate Deregistration/Updating

The MOBY Central code does not allow you to deregister a service with a
Signature URL, nor can you update it.  This can be very annoying, I
know!!  It's not sufficient to just wait for the agent to visit during
the night... there must be a better way!

It is undocumented because we're still experimenting to see if there are
any obvious down-sides, but MOBY Central is currently configured to
trigger an Agent visit if you call the registerService method with your
SignatureURL as the only parameter.  This allows you to *immediately*
deregister or update a service (based on a local edit of your Signature
RDF document) rather than waiting for the next agent crawl.  

I invite all developers to try this and let us know if this seems like a
sensible behaviour.  There may be better ways to accomplish this, so if
you have other ideas, or if you see any potential security-holes in this
approach, please let us know.

============

Cheers all!

Mark

-- 
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics, iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
fax: 604 806 9274

"Since the point of a definition is to explain the meaning of a term to
   someone who is unfamiliar with its proper application, the use of
language that doesn't help such a person learn how to apply the term is
 pointless. Thus, "happiness is a warm puppy" may be a lovely thought,
                     but it is a lousy definition."
                                                                Köhler et al, 2006