ids and URLs (was Re: [DAS2] Ontologies in DAS/2)

[chris mungall]

I'm mostly skim the messages here, so I may be missing something, but 
I'm a little confused by this:

On Feb 8, 2006, at 8:36 AM, Andrew Dalke wrote:

>
>     http://das.server/../types?ontology=SO:exon

I don't understand this - SO:exon isn't an ontology

>
> That gets all of the exon types, but not the ones from Vega.
> The Vega types have a source="Vega".  DAS type queries do
> not support searching on that field.
>
> PROPOSAL:  Add a "source=" (case-insensitive substring search)
> field to the types query.  (I don't think there is any contention
> here so I'll add it.)
>
>     http://das.server/../types?ontology=SO:exon;source=Vega

What does 'types' return? A type from an ontology (eg SO:exon) or 
something else? Why would source be recorded here? Surely source would 
be a valid constraint on a feature query, but not a type query.

Perhaps it's the case that in DAS a 'type' means some kind of arbitrary 
grouping (eg features of type X and source Y), and 'ontology' means a 
term/type from an ontology. If it isn't too late I'd suggest changing 
these conventions.