[moby] [MOBY-dev] Re: Problems with Biomoby servicesin Taverna 1.2

[Haase, Dirk]

OK, things become clearer I think. You didn't really get what Heiko was suggesting about the usage of collections...

Heiko, Rebecca and me think that a collection is ueseful _only_ if the collection itself is a meaningful entity (example: several sequences make up a cluster). In our view it does not make sense to pack otherwise unrelated things into a collection just because they are all results for a certain query.

I admit that our understanding is not compatible with the current way for registering services. The easy(?) solution would be to abandon any cardinality confirmations from the registry. That is if a service is registered with an output A it may output any number of A-objects.

Another way to tackle this would be to introduce a sort of 'has/has-a' for service outputs, analogous to the object definitions.

dirk

-----Original Message-----
From: moby-dev-bounces at portal.open-bio.org on behalf of Mark Wilkinson
Sent: Fri 7/8/2005 8:58 PM
To: Core developer announcements
Cc: Ernst, Rebecca; Martin Senger; mobydev
Subject: RE: [moby] [MOBY-dev] Re: Problems with Biomoby servicesin	Taverna 1.2
 
On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 20:45 +0200, Haase, Dirk wrote:

> Once you say (in the reply to Heiko's mail): you can safely return each entry as a Simple element, there can be any number of them in one mobyData block. Moreover, this would actually be a misuse of a collection.

What I said in response to Heiko (or at least, what I intended to say)
was that there was not a limitation of the mobyData block to having just
one child element (regardless of its type - simple, collection, or
secondary).  So the following is vaid:

<mobyData>
	<Simple A/>
	<Simple B/>
	<Collection Q>
		<Simple/>
		<Simple/>
	</Collection> 
</mobyData>

I didn't say that you SHOULD return all of your Simples individually,
only that you COULD return individual Simples in a single output... if
that was meaningful in the context of your service... individual outputs
must, however, be individually registered in the registry 

(output => [A,B,Q])


> But in the reply to Rebecca's question from February you clearly stated: if the number of results is unpredictable they have to go into a collection.

That's right.... and obvious, since you cannot create a service
signature any other way - you can't say output => [A....infinite]

> If I summed up both replies correctly, the contradiction is obvious, isn't it?

I don't see it.

M


-- 
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor
Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital
Vancouver, BC


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