[DAS] das woes

[Ewan Birney]

The point is Matthew that everytime anyone has tried to build
semantically rich transfer systems it always gets mirred because
it is **really hard** to get 50 groups world wide to agree on
the myriad of semantics in all their heads and the software they
write.


Having gone through multiple iterations of this, I know this
to be true.


DAS went to the opposite end - it said that it wanted to make
other groups interoperate and choose the bare minimum to make
a display-orientated interoperation. DAS does this *very well*
and has never claimed to do anything else.


I also was somewhat annoyed about this when DAS started but now
I am actually the other way around - this is what made DAS possible,
and I don;t think anyone is in a position to complain about it.



Re: richer semantics - installing a local ensembl is very sane
and why we made Ensembl to be completely downloadable. Ensembl
has much more semantics and is only possible to keep on the
straight and narrow due the fact that all 30 of us keep in a very
tight loop and are very focused on what we want to do.


Re: richer semantics distributed - you can have a go at it, but
please don't (a) think this is easy (b) criticise DAS for not
doing it. DAS never said it was going to do it - it delivered on
what it said it was going to do...



ewan