[MOBY-l] Re: [MOBY-dev] lease versus agent for registry updating

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Gordon <gordonp at ucalgary.ca> writes:

  >>> Alternatively, you pass back some magic cookie when the lease is
  >>> taken out in the first place, that is required for
  >>> deregistration.
  >>>
  >>>
  >> Well, this is exactly what biomoby has now - and nobody seems to
  >> like it. That's why we are talking how to change it.
  >>
  Paul> Absolutely.  Keeping a cookie around somewhere for a month,
  Paul> then manually using it to renew the lease (remember,
  Paul> automating the lease renewal is just as bad as having an RDF
  Paul> file that you need to change) is bad.  If I lose my cookie, or
  Paul> it is intercepted, I'm toast.

I don't think that you'd need the cookie to renew your lease, just to
remove it before hand. If you lose it, then you just have to wait for
it to run out naturally. 

Of course, if it's built into the service provider libraries, there is
no real reason that you should lose it. 

  >> So the above would work only if I can prove who I am. And the
  >> only way how to do it (if we do not want to introduce passwords
  >> etc.) is to let somebody come back to my place (because only I
  >> can control such a place). That means an agent...
  >>
  Paul> Exactly my point from before about multiple host
  Paul> names/machine.  You should only be able to advertise a service
  Paul> available in MOBY from the ucalgary.ca domain if you are able
  Paul> to put an RDF document on a web server in that domain.  It's a
  Paul> security check of sorts.  I don't see how a lease-only system
  Paul> could easily acheive this without some signing certificates,
  Paul> and in fact I could prevent the NCBI from registering services
  Paul> by doing it first and getting the cookie they need to fix the
  Paul> registry.  

I think that the lease is a property of the registration, not of the
service. So, if you register a service, it won't prevent anyone else
from registering the same service again. Again, if you put some sort
of call back into the leasing system, you could prevent anyone from
registering a service that they do not own. Although, personally, I
don't see any major problem with third party registration. Feta
effectively works on third party registration, as most of the semantic
descriptions do not come from the service provider. 


Phil