[MOBY-dev] An interesting article from the myGrid project

[Mark Wilkinson]

This article does a nice job of describing the problem space :-)  I
particularly like the last couple of paragraphs - in many ways this is
(to me) the crux of the problem.  Our users want to be (of think they
want to be) involved in the negotiation of even the most straightforward
queries.  I think that we are ahead of the game v.v. B2B/B2C because
generally speaking there are well-defined, well understood and generally
accepted ways of representing the input and result datasets, so long as
we keep them relatively simple.  Where we fall down (so far) is in the
provision of all of the parameters that the biologist/bioinformatician
wants to tweak and twiddle... though when was the last time you saw a
bench scientist change the default parameters on a Blast query??  ;-)

I do disagree with myGrid including the recording of provision
information as part of the discovery/transport specification... I think
this is a 100% client-side problem.  Regardless, we haven't dealt with
that in any effective way either, since we don't even provide versioning
information in our output, so I shouldn't point fingers...

Anyway, I enjoyed the article.  It came over the I3C Registry list
today.  Apologies if you got it twice.

Cheers all!

M

http://www1.bcs.org.uk/DocsRepository/03700/3782/greenwoo.pdf




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