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

[Mark Wilkinson]

Edward Kawas wrote:

>>   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?
>  
>

Just to expand this a little bit more - biomoby.org will NOT be the 
resolver for that LSID, but it will be the authority server for that LSID.

>>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.
>  
>
In the early days when we were first considering LSID's in MOBY, there 
wasn't a widely agreed-upon standard for "wrapping" someone elses 
identifier.  It seems now that there is a "standard" (I don't know if 
this is a recommendation from teh LSID community or not, but it seems 
that the core LSID developers do it themselves, so it must be 
supported).  We might consider changing the LSID structure for MOBY 
Service Instances to e.g.:

urn:lsid:biomoby.org.www.illuminae.com:serviceinstance:getGenBankff

It makes no difference at all at the end of the day, since LSID's are 
opaque identifiers :-) 

>>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.
>  
>
Yup... that suggestion (to use the version position to denote 
replication) would be very dangerous!  However, it is an interesting 
problem, since I don't think the LSID communuty would be very 
comfortable with a single LSID referring to multiple resources... even 
if they are "identical".  Martin, do you have an opinion about this?

M