[MOBY-l] Time-to-live as service metadata

[Frank Gibbons]

At 03:41 PM 3/17/2004, Martin Senger wrote:
> > Or have a Time To Live associated with a service.  The policy would be
> > central.  By default, a service stays listed for, lets say, 7 days...
> >
>    I like it, and I like that somebody brought it here again. I was trying
>a year ago, but nobody listened to me. This "leasing" is a concept that
>has been discussed a lot within myGrid project and is very appealling. It
>is part of a broader question of "quality of service" (or "metadata"
>attached to a service).

Sounds like a good idea to me (not that I have any experience in this 
stuff). I think, if MOBY takes off in a big way, this might turn out to be 
an Achilles' heel if not tackled early. What will happen if, five years 
from now, there are 1000 services registered, but only 250 of them actually 
work as advertised? You're going to have some pretty unhappy service 
consumers on your hands, and it's going to become harder for others to 
justify adding services.

Imagine MOBY as one of those maps you get a holiday fair, showing what each 
booth is and what they're selling. If most of the booths are empty, or are 
selling something different from what the little map says, pretty soon 
people start to say "oh, MOBY used to be great when it started out, but you 
don't want to go there now unless you really have a lot of time on your 
hands - most of the booths are empty, and those that aren't empty are 
selling something different from what you expect."

"Time to live" sounds like a fairly low-maintenance way to go.

-Frank


PhD, Computational Biologist,
Harvard Medical School BCMP/SGM-322, 250 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115, USA.
Tel: 617-432-3555       Fax: 
617-432-3557       http://llama.med.harvard.edu/~fgibbons