[DAS] Writeback implementation

[Gustavo Salazar]

Hello everybody,

This is my first post in this list, therefore I'm going to start to 
introduce myself. I'm Gustavo Salazar, I'm currently busy doing my  MSc 
degree in computer science in the University of Cape Town - South Africa.
The project that I'm working on is about the implementation of the 
writeback capabilities in the DAS client Dasty.
My original Idea was to use as a server the writeback implementation 
created by Asia and Andreas. However i've been notice that this 
implementation works as an extra server and Dazzle is kind of middleman 
between the clients and the writeback (am I wrong?) which sound like a 
good idea in terms of independence, but it looks to me that it will be 
hard for a client to identify if a  feature is original or has been edited.
That's why I decided to explore others alternatives and now I started to 
work reimplementing the server DAS writeback capabilities not in Dazzle 
but in MyDas.
I thing the writeback server should works as a meta-annotation server, 
which means that none of the modifications, additions or deletions will 
be actually changing the original server. in such a way a DAS client 
should see the information of the writeback as an extra layer, therefore 
it should first query regular DAS servers, built in memory the graphic, 
and at the end it will query the writeback server to modify this graphic 
with the community information.
In this way the user can choose to use the wb information or not.
I will use the protocol as in 
http://biodas.org/documents/das2/das2_writeback.html with the 
modifications that appears in the Asia's Theses. which implies the use 
of OpenId as the authorization system, I agree with the pros and and 
cons of OpenId that Andy posted, therefore if the consensus is to use 
another authorization system I will adapt my implementation.
I will appreciate any comment or suggestions or if anybody wants more 
details of my ideas please no hesitate in ask me.

Regards,

--
Gustavo Salazar