[MOBY-l] Re: [MOBY-dev] Semantic Moby and Web Services <-> Semantic Web integration efforts?

[Catherine Letondal]

On Nov 11, 2004, at 1:28 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:

>
> OWL-S/WSMO are trying to do a different thing to moby-s. The main aim
> for these technologies is to use highly expressive logics to enable
> automated composition and choreography of web services. This is a nice
> idea, but, my own suspicion is that most biologists, or bioinformatics
> service providers are not going to go to the effort to describe their
> services logically.
>
> Moby-s on the other hand takes a more constrained view of
> semantics. It's trying to produce semantic descriptions which are good
> enough to reduce the problem for the biologist to selecting from one
> or a short list, rather than then 500.
>

I meant S-Moby in fact, not Moby-S, sorry for this mistake.

> There is a paper in this years ISWC (currently going on now!), which
> you can get from here...
>
> http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~phillord/download/publications/biomoby- 
> comparison-iswc2004.pdf
>

Thanks a lot for this information. I have read the paper, which indeed  
helped a lot to understand your underlying choices (BTW, I would be  
interested to know about  the feedback it had at the ISCW conference -  
generally, bioinformatics is considered as a "very specific" area, and  
since the differences between "generial" applications such as  
e-commerce and e-science are very well explained in your paper, I'm  
curious to know whether the audience reacted).

I still have a question about the comparison to OWL-S. In section 7 of  
your paper (Service provision and Service interfaces), you explain that  
OWL-S defines a grounding ontology, and that the 3 approaches (moby-s,  
s-moby and myGrid) have chosen a simpler approach. I understand that  
the problem that is addressed here is to have a high description not  
only of domain concepts, but also on their relations, and that this is  
not required in the 3 approaches, for different reasons. But I don't  
understand your explanations:
How is the S-Moby interface defined by its "upper" ontology? I have  
carefully read the S-moby design document  
(http://www.biomoby.org/S-MOBY/doc/Design/S-MOBY_Design_Overview.html),  
what do you call an upper ontology there - the set of RDF graphs  
submitted by providers? You also mention that moby-s interfaces are not  
heterogeneous (and thus does not need an ontology to interconnect  
concepts). What is not heterogeneous and why?

Thanks for any reference or additional explananation,

--
Catherine Letondal -- Institut Pasteur