[MOBY-dev] Shims

[Stian Soiland]

On 28. apr. 2006, at 22:09, Paul Gordon wrote:

> This is a very general question, especially for non-native-English
> speakers.  I was going to add  a top-level "Shim" category of services
> to the ontology,  but I'm pretty sure most non-native-English speakers
> would have no idea what this means.  I'm borrowing the term from

As a non-native speaker I had to look up the term itself. However, we  
are using the term "shim" in mygrid/Taverna for the very same concept  
of making services with nearly-the-same-datatypes work together.  
However, I wish there could be a better word to present to the user  
what this category would be. I would assume many like me to just  
assume this had something to do with "the shim system" which I didn't  
know anything about, and so I would never explore it.

"Conversion" is much better, even if its already in use. Maybe look  
into what really are the different conversions, and call the shimming  
"Format conversion" or something.

-- 
Stian Soiland, myGrid project
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~ssoiland/