[DAS] standard entry_points

[Brian]

Hmmm...

	I'm not sure we are on the same wavelength here. I will outline
the problem that we are experiencing more completely:

	We have found that each implementor of the DAS spec has come up
with his/her own way of representing the concept of an "entry_point". The
spec loosely defines these entities and as such provides a lot of room for
interpretation. The Dazzle implementors can jut pick the contigs out of
the ensembl schema and serve these up. Wormbase calls their chromosomes by
a naming convention such as "CHROMOSOME_I". Other Human DAS reference
servers "or annotation servers" just provide a "1" or "2". This is
insufficient for us to be able compare the semantic meanings of these
entities across different servers so that we can make sure that we are all
talking about the same entry_point. While we could always come up with a
huge DB of tuples that map all these semantic relationships, wouldn't it
be better to have a published specification that allowed all implementors
of the DAS specification to publish entry_points in a machine readable
way?? Is this not one of the main points of a DAS like system?? 

	I propose that we try and standardize our entry_points naming
conventions on a per organism basis. This way we can give a DAS client a
reasonably good chance at figuring out if two servers are talking about
the same place in the genome. Perhaps we can just settle on th top level
entry_points and allow our software systems to do a quick and dirty
nucleotide check to figure out if they are really the same thing under the
top level entry_point?? 

	How do others feel about this??


					-B

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Matthew Pocock wrote:

> John Mayer wrote:
> > Wouldn't it be helpful if the DAS spec  included standard
> > top level entry_point names for the most common species
> > so DAS clients didn't have to scramble around  a needless
> > variety of labels like    chr1  CHR1  1   etc.   ?
> > John Mayer
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > DAS mailing list
> > DAS@biodas.org
> > http://biodas.org/mailman/listinfo/das
> > 
> 
> Or perhaps richer descriptive data associated with the entry points? 
> Perhaps even some structured descriptive data?
> 
> ;-)
> 
> M
> 
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> http://biodas.org/mailman/listinfo/das
> 

-- 
----------------
Brian Gilman <gilmanb@jforge.net>