[MOBY] [MOBY-dev] graphs of the services and data types

[Mark Wilkinson]

On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 19:33, Martin Senger wrote:

> I am not sure if I
> understand fully how services should be connected. Especially I am not
> sure how to combine services that has collections as their outputs. Should
> such services be connected with a service that consume a single element of
> such collection, for exanple?

That's an interesting question, and one that I have thought about quite
a bit in the process of designing MOBY clients.  

IMO, a service that outputs Simple articles should be considered to
input into services that consume Collections of those types of Simples. 
Similarly, services that output Collection articles should be considered
competent to make inputs to services that consume Simple's.  This can
all be handled quite easily client-side.  I would limit this only by
saying that services which consume **more than one type of object** in a
single invocation should perhaps be represented differently in your
graphics... perhaps a dotted line between the output object type and the
consuming service to show that it isn't a *perfect* match of output to
input, but that there is a "partial" match there.

>    Could you please check the current pictures (they are based on the moby
> central snapshot of today) and tell me what is wrong, what connections are
> missing (the services with collections are not there at all)?

There is one connection conspicuously missing, and that is the output of
a Blast can be input into the BlastParser service.  There may be others
missing, but I think if you can figure out why that one is missing, the
others might fix themselves :-)

>    Pictures are available at:
>    http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~senger/jMoby/images/data-types.png

I like that one very much!  What software is making that?

>    http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~senger/jMoby/images/services.png.

This is also very cool - Does it currently restrict connections only to
those that consume appropriate namespaces as well as appropriate object
types?  This is probably *more* correct that just joining object input
and output object Classes, but it makes the query painful because I was
trying to limit the joins by putting all namespaces into the same column
in the table.


>    When I get feedback I plan to make creation of such pictures available
> in several forms:
>    a) as a real MOBY service, and

Excellent!!  

>    c) as a web GUI allowing to call the MOBY service and show immediatelly
> current graphs.


EXCELLENT!!!

This is really great, Martin - thanks for stepping up to the plate for this
task, which going to be so useful to people!  (and thanks Starbucks for energizing
Martin with wireless coffee :-) )

M