[MOBY-l] Discovery protocols review

[Lincoln Stein]

Thanks Ken!  Also thanks to Andrew, I just saw your review!

Lincoln

On Thursday 13 March 2003 09:47 am, Ken Steube wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
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Lincoln D. Stein                           Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
lstein at cshl.org			                  Cold Spring Harbor, NY
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