[MOBY-l] Discovery protocols review

[Ken Steube]

Hello, here is my review of discovery protocols...looking forward
to seeing everybody this weekend!

Ken

-------------------------------------
Ken Steube            steube at sdsc.edu
San Diego Supercomputer Center @ UCSD
San Diego, California             USA



MOBY-related Protocols: Discovery

Web service discovery mechanisms are created to provide a means to
locate web services that are of interest to your research or business.
More specifically, three types of lookups are used when locating web
services:

	white pages	organization's name and contact info
	yellow pages	industrial category and geographical location
	green pages	how to use a service

Included below is a summary of the features, strengths and weaknesses
of MOBY-Central, UDDI, LDAP and ebXML.  I added CORBA Trader to the
list to contrast an older binary protocol method to the newer
text-based protocol methods.

MOBY-Central
	Name: Model Organism Bring Your own
	Reference: http://biomoby.org
	Reference: http://biomoby.org/wilkinson_links_2002.pdf
	Purpose: an architecture for the discovery and distribution
		of biological data through web services
	Provides: white pages, yellow pages, green pages
	Strengths: object-driven registry query system with object and
		service ontologies, can easily adapt to new data types,
		we have our own data types so it's easy to have output
		of one service be input to another
	Weaknesses: not industry standard, relatively few developers and users

UDDI
	Name: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
	Reference: http://uddi.org
	Reference: Charles Goldfarb's XML Handbook, 4th edition, page 689
	Purpose: UDDI creates a standard interoperable platform that
		enables companies and applications to quickly, easily,
		and dynamically find and use Web services over the Internet
	Provides: white pages, yellow pages, green pages
	Strengths: Web services may be described with WSDL and invoked
		with SOAP, so it builds upon two popular standards
	Weaknesses: TBD

ebXML
	Name: Electronic Business using XML
	Reference: http://ebxml.org
	Purpose: ebXML is a set of specifications that together enable
		a modular electronic business framework. The vision of
		ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where
		enterprises of any size and in any geographical location
		can meet and conduct business with each other through
		the exchange of XML based messages
	Strengths: TBD
	Weaknesses: TBD

LDAP
	Name: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
	Reference: openldap.org
	Reference: Charles Goldfarb's XML Handbook, 4th edition, page 239
	Purpose: provides a networked database for resource management
	Standards: X.500
	Related: Directory Service Markup Language (DSML) helps provide
		a linkage between LDAP service and legacy resource
		management systems
	Strengths: TBD
	Weaknesses: not intended for scientific data, but rather for
		storing info about people and hardware resources

CORBA Trader
	Name: Common Object Request Broker Architecture
	Reference: http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~mvermins/corba/trader
	Purpose: yellow pages for CORBA services
	Strengths: TBD
	Weaknesses: binary protocol means interoperability problems between
		systems with different operating systems and with different
		binary representations such as endian order, does not use
		latest industry favorite SOAP, CORBA programming is very
		specialized with a steep learning curve