[MOBY-l] URGENT: Attention ALL SERVICE PROVIDERS

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all, 

we are getting ready to make a very significant change in MOBY-S, so I
need **all existing service providers** to do a one-time exercise.  This
is also important for those who have their own MOBY Central
installations.

As we discussed at the last MOBY meeting, it is desirable and 'good' for
MOBY Central's registry to extract its information using a mechanism
more like a web crawler (more like S-MOBY :-) ).  As a result, Nina has
written an agent that will crawl known MOBY service providers and
extract their service signatures from RDF files.  The agent runs on a
cron, and behaves as follows:

1)  It looks up the last known address of your service signature in the
database
2)  It GET's that address expecting to find an RDF file
3)  If it doesn't find a valid RDF file there, then it flags an error;
after a certain number of errors your service(s) will be deregistered. 
(I believe that it also emails the contactEmail address and tells them
that there was an error.)
4)  If it finds an RDF, it compares the signatures of each service
described in that RDF with the database, and updates or adds these
service descriptions as necessary.
5)  If it expects to find a service signature in this RDF, and can't
find it, it concludes that the service has been taken off-line, and it
will de-register that service.
6)  The agent should be (touch wood!) tolerant of additional RDF in this
signature, such that you can add your own additional annotations to this
RDF as you wish.


The behaviour of MOBY Central is as follows:

1)  When you register a service, you may include a SignatureURL field in
your XML (or as a parameter to the MOBY::Client::Central API) indicating
where your RDF will be located.
2)  Upon successful registration of your service, MOBY Central will send
you the RDF signature of your service - you will not have to generate
this yourself!  (unless you want to... and feel free to do so!).  It
appears in the <RDF> block of the MOBY Registration object (the ->RDF
method of the MOBY:Registration object)
3)  To ensure that your service is not deleted, you must place this RDF
signature in the location that you specified in the signatureURL field
when you registered your service.
4)  If you do not include a signatureURL in your service registration,
your service will be de-registered the next time the agent runs (since
it will be unable to find an RDF file matching your service).  This
might be useful for people who are doing simple test services, as they
wont clutter up the registry for long...
4)  The deregisterService method of the MOBY Central API will **NOT**
function for any service that has a signatureURL.  It will function as
expected for any service does not have a signatureURL.


So, in short, services now have a signatureURL that points to an RDF
file describing their service.  An agent will crawl around on a regular
basis looking at these RDF signatures.  If you update a service, you
change the RDF.  if you remove a service, you delete that portion of the
RDF.  If you add a service, you either add a new signature to the RDF
and let the agent register it automatically, or you use the
registerService function of MOBY Central as you have in the past, and
allow MOBY Central to generate the RDF for you.  Services without a
signatureURL WILL BE DELETED!!!!

Of course, at the moment nobody has a signatureURL :-)  I have set up a
simple CGI page for existing service providers where they can supply a
URL and get the signature RDF for all of their existing services:

http://mobycentral.cbr.nrc.ca/cgi-bin/getRDFXML.pl


We will switch the agent on in a week or so, and after that all services
without a signatureURL will be deleted, so please go to this page ASAP. 

If the script doesn't work, or if you have any problems please let me
know and I or Nina will fix them immediately.

I hope this isn't too disruptive to people.  I'm convinced that it is a
change for the better!  Contact me by phone or email if you have any
concerns.

Cheers all!

M
-- 
Mark Wilkinson, 
Assistant Professor (Bioinformatics)
Dept. of Medical Genetics, 
University of British Columbia
James Hogg iCAPTURE Centre for Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research
166 - 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6Z 1Y6

tel: (604) 682 2344 ext. 62129
fax: (604) 806 9274
 
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