[MOBY-dev] teleconference

Wed Jan 22 00:12:08 UTC 2003

Hello all-

Damian suggested that I send these out as potential food for discussion in
tomorrow's teleconference; this is a little short notice, so if you don't
get a chance to look them over before tomorrow, don't worry about it; I can
try to summarize or we can offline or defer discussions...

"In Praise of Evolvable Systems:
Why something as poorly designed as the Web became The Next Big Thing,
and what that means for the future."
http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html

This first one is pretty short and non-technical, but raises some interesting
points as to why the web became so pervasive while "better-designed"
architectures had much less impact; in particular, it might help focus our
thinking about what aspects of the web are creating the problems we're trying
to solve, and what aspects should be held as "exemplars".

"The Tao of e-business services :
 The evolution of Web applications into service-oriented components with Web
 	services"
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-tao/?dwzone=webservices

The next one was written a few years ago (by a guy who seems to have some
involvement now with I3C, for whatever that's worth); it discusses the
issue of "web services" from a somewhat higher perspective,
using the notion of a "service-oriented architecture" and
discussing the various roles that components of such an architecture play
in the system without reference to any particular standards. In particular,
I think it does a reasonably nice job of separating out some of the pieces of
the puzzle and arguing for the centrality of the problem of service description
(from the requester's perspective, the provider's perspective and the
perspective of a "broker" with the task of matching service requests with
published descriptions).

Associated is this little bit of commentary (URL below) on the aforementioned
essay, which tries to explicate (just a little) some of the biological
analogies made in the latter into terms of some of the technologies and
design ideas floating around in various places.

http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2002/04/05/neurotransmitters.html

If anyone else has material that they've found that seems helpful for
getting ourselves oriented, please feel free to share...

We may also want to talk about the "MOBY stack" presented by Lukas at PAG
(as I heard from Damian), which was something like (Lukas, please correct
as necessary!!):

				Standard		MOBY
Discovery:		UDDI			MOBY-Central
Description:	WSDL			WSDL
Messaging:		XML/HTML		XML/SOAP
Protocol:		HTTP/SMTP		HTTP

In particular, I'd like to hear Mark's thoughts from his work on the MOBY
prototype about how some of these technologies fit in;

Also, I've thrown together a rough draft at my own (evolving) roadmap of
some of the technologies we may want to look at, I'll throw that along for
everyone to pick apart/add to as desired...

Description
	-Data
		-contents of responses
		-contents of requests
	-Meta-data
	-Interface
		-describing (at some level) syntax of request and content of response
	-Data "typing"
	-Syntax (lexical structure)
	-Semantics (meaningful use- supports "reasoning" by some processor)
		-Consistency (of given set of axioms/rules)
			(used to constrain ontology definition)
		-Concept "Subsumption"
		-Concept Equivalence
		-Instance assignment to classes/finding set of instances
			satisfying properties of concept
		-Equivalence/Contradiction of statements?
XML

XML Schema Definition Language (XSD)
	support for simple datatypes
	support for making complex elements out of simple elements
	extensibility mechanisms (extension/restriction)
	modularity

WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange):

	support for XML encoding of standard data structures (records, arrays, structures),
		no messaging
	http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/xml-messaging/
	http://www.infoloom.com/gcaconfs/WEB/chicago98/simeonov.HTM

WSDL Web Service Definition Language
WIDL
	http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-widl
This document provides the specification for the Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL), a metalanguage
that implements a service-based architecture over the document-based resources of the World Wide Web. WIDL is an
application of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML); it allows interactions with Web servers to be defined as functional
interfaces that can be accessed by remote systems over standard Web protocols, and provides the structure necessary for
generating client code in languages such as Java, C/C++, COBOL, and Visual Basic. WIDL enables a practical and
cost-effective means for diverse systems to be rapidly integrated across corporate intranets, extranets, and the Interne
	http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.allen.html

DAML-S (DAML Service)

RDDL (resource directory description language)- probably not, see discussion at
	http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/28/rddl.html
		"A namespace URL should point to a directory of resources
		rather than a single web page or schema."
	http://xml.oreilly.com/news/xmlnut2_0201.html

Publishing/Finding/Matchmaking
	-Registries/Directories: constraining (to some extent) how registrants must
	describe themselves, in order to be meaningfully understood in terms of the
	query/match facilities supported by the registry
		UDDI
		ebXML
		MOBY-Central
		X.500/LDAP
	-Decentralized approaches
		Google/Yahoo/DMOZ (Directory Mozilla/Open directory)
		WSIL- Web Service Inspection Language
		HERM- HTTP Extensions for Resource Metadata
			http://www.xfront.com/dist-reg/distributed-registry.html
	-Querying
		Google

		Semantically aware
			TAMBIS

Messaging:
	Statefulness
	Error Handling
	Free Extension/Mandatory/Optional

	SOAP
	XML-RPC
		interesting little note from Eric Raymond (Cathedral and Bazaar) re:
		UNIX-style (i.e. stream-oriented piping) being "antithetical to
		classical RPC", but somehow not (??) to xml-rpc/soap like approaches:
			http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$1265?mode=topic
	HTTP

	http://www.w3.org/2000/03/29-XML-protocol-matrix

Open information space:
	URI-addressable vs. "embedded"
	RDF "anyone can say anything about anything"

Semantics:
	XML DTD(?)
	XML Schema
	RDF/RDFS
	DAML/OIL/OWL

Logics:
	Description Logics
	Frame-based logics
	Conceptual graphs/Semantic Networks

Reasoning/Inference engines:
	FaCT

Resource annotation projects
	SHOE
	OntoBroker

Open Linking Projects
	COHSE
	OpenURL

Andrew Farmer
adf at ncgr.org
(505) 995-4464
Database Administrator/Software Developer
National Center for Genome Resources