[MOBY-dev] data by reference - a request for comments

[Stian Soiland-Reyes]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Edward Kawas <edward.kawas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Don't worry about Taverna! Whatever we decide will most likely be the same
> amount of work. So let's just get it right.

Taverna 2 has built-in support for references (and their
dereferencing) - so you could implement any referencing scheme you
like, really, there's just a very simple interface to implement:

http://taverna.cvs.sourceforge.net/taverna/t2reference/t2reference-api/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/reference/ExternalReferenceSPI.java?view=markup


Example implementation:

http://taverna.cvs.sourceforge.net/taverna/t2reference/t2reference-core-extensions/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/reference/impl/external/http/HttpReference.java?view=markup


Plain HTTP references should work out of the box, though. You could
make a version of this and add your own added-value semantics to the
URIs - and it could still also work with other non-biomoby-services
that recognised HTTP-URLs.

t2 allows you to add translators between different reference schemes -
so if you ended up with say "urn:biomoby:fish/1337" and you knew that
you could download such references by using
http://download.biomoby.org/fish/1337.xml - you can easily add a
BiomobyReferenceToHttpReference translator that constructs such URIs
given the biomoby reference.


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/blog/