[MOBY-dev] MOBY Spec: Central - general features

[Mark Wilkinson]

MOBY Central is a registry for biological web services; including
"MOBY-compliant" services, CGI services, and non-MOBY-compliant SOAP
services.  Other service types may be added in the future, but should
not affect the API definitions for these three types of services.

The API for MOBY Central can be implemented in any language, and
similarly MOBY Central's public interface should be accessible to any
language that can pass XML over HTTP.

MOBY Central is the registry for its own Object, Service and Namespace
ontologies.  

In the absence of a clear direction to follow at ths time w.r.t. merging
of the LSID and the MOBY Triple (due to MOBY's requirement for
registration of Namespaces, and the lack of an obvious semantically
similar "Namespace" concept in the LSID world) we will use, where
possible, the abbreviations defined by the GeneOntology
consortium(http://www.geneontology.org/doc/GO.xrf_abbs) to indicate the
namespace of our Objects.  In cases where these need to be extended, a
preference will be given to hierarchical extensions (NCBI might be
extended to NCBI/GI and NCBI/Accession for example), and where a
namespace doesn't clearly exist in the GO definitions, we will define
our own through brief discussion on the -dev or -l lists and
subsequently suggest it to the GeneOntology consortium for inclusion
into their list in an attempt to prevent these two lists in sync.

MOBY Central is the registry for MOBY-compliant Object models (in the
form of XSD documents) for MOBY-compliant services, and is the registry
for Object Class Names only for non-MOBY SOAP services.  MOBY-compliant
services must use MOBY-compliant Object models.


REGARDING MOBY-COMPLIANT SERVICES
	1)  MOBY Central can do lookups on Object Class names, and namespaces,
based on input or output (final API to be specified in a future document

	2)  MOBY Central can do lookups based on Service Type ontology terms

	3)  MOBY Central can do lookups based on keywords from a human readable
description of the service.

	4)  The WSDL document for these services is auto-generated by MOBY
Central upon client request.



REGARDING non-MOBY SOAP SERVICES
	1)  MOBY Central can do lookups on Object class names (no namespaces)
based on input or output (final API to be specified in a future
document)

	2)  MOBY Central can do lookups based on Service Type ontology terms

	(1 & 2) Confirm that non-MOBY SOAP services *must* register both their
input/output objects (by Class), and a valid Service Type (in the
service ontology)prior to registering their service.

	3)  MOBY Central can do lookups based on keywords appearing in the
human readable description of that service.

	4)  MOBY Central provides the URL to a WSDL for that service
definition; the WSDL is NOT generated by MOBY Central.


REGARDING CGI SERVICES

	1)  Service providers register a sprintf formatted GET string for their
CGI (equates to the input type of their service)

	2)  Service providers register a MIME type indicating the output type
of their service (e.g. Image/JPEG, or text/HTML)

	3)  MOBY Central can do lookups on keywords appearing in the human
readable description of the service.

	4)  MOBY Central returns the URL and sprintf formatted string (not a
WSDL) to the client upon request.



More details to come in later documents.

M




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