[MOBY-dev] Shims

[Carole Goble]

Stian

as the person who coined the term shim it is there precisely because 
there are a whole range of words that have been used.
mediator, adaptor, conversion etc. not all shims are conversions.

the new term gives a fresh start. By the way, the first shim paper not 
by manchester is now published

Adapters, shims, and glue--service interoperability for in silico 
experiments
    U. Radetzki, U. Leser, S. C. Schulze-Rauschenbach, J. Zimmermann, J. 
    Lussem, T. Bode, and A. B. Cremers
    Bioinformatics 2006 22: 1137-1143. 
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/9/1137?etoc 


Carole

> 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.
>
>