[MOBY-dev] rfcf 5. LSIDs and Service Instances

[Edward Kawas]

>    However, I have some doubts about the way to specify
> the LSID of the
> services in biomoby. There are an example in the biomoby
> metadata-resolver:
> 
> urn:lsid:biomoby.org:serviceinstance:www.illuminae.com,get
> SHound3DNeighboursFromGi
> 
> (The LSID syntax is
> urn:lsid:authority:namespace:identifier:revision)
> 
> Why is the authority "biomoby.org" and this one is not
> www.illuminae.com?
The authority is BioMoby.org because it's the issuing
authority. In other words, it is the place where we can go
and ask for information regarding a particular service and
retrieve metadata about it. www.illuminae.com is the
authority that registered the service
getSHound3DNeighboursFromGi into the registry hosted by
BioMoby.org. Does this make sense?


> Why is the service name separated of the lsid?
The name was separated so that in the event that there were
2 services registered with the same service name we wouldn't
run into conflicts. Also, a service should be uniquely
identified by the authority that registered it and its name.

> If we use biomoby as authority but we wrote the services
> as identifiers
> then an approach to denote more of one instance (or
> replicated service)
>   into the same lsid could be using the revision field.
> For instance:
> 
> urn:lsid:biomoby.org:serviceinstance:getSHound3DNeighbours
> FromGi:1
> urn:lsid:biomoby.org:serviceinstance:getSHound3DNeighbours
> FromGi:2
> 
The revision id is meant to convey to someone that the
underlying object 'pointed to' by the lsid has changed. So
for instance, when the agent is running, and it notices that
the service instance has changed a little (new description
added or a new input or output, etc), then the revision id
would have to be used.

> urn:lsid:www.illuminae.com:biomoby.org:getSHound3DNeighbou
> rsFromGi
> urn:lsid:www.other.com:biomoby.org:getSHound3DNeighboursFr
> omGi
>
>    With this kind of LSID the MetaData-resolver could know
> that if the namespace is biomoby then the element to
> resolve is a
> service, and we should have one LSID per service.
One of the problems with this approach is that how do you go
about resolving other Moby objects like service types,
datatypes, namespaces,etc? I believe that your proposal also
doesn't follow the correct use of the LSID protocol.