[MOBY-dev] [moby] Re: Lengthy commentary on registry policies and my own responsibilities

[Mark Wilkinson]

> Sure! But it's in the interest of the people in Genome Canada  
> projects to be able to use services from other service providers as  
> well. 

Absolutely, and they are well aware of that!  Luckily, the decisions
that are best for them, are (usually, and IMO) also best for the rest of
us, since we all have the same goal in mind :-)


> Maybe it could be mirrored for load  
> balancing and fail-over, but that will only work if those Centrals  
> are *perfect* mirrors. If people start to host "partial" mirrors or  
> outdated mirrors it won't work. In that case everyone will go  
> straight to the official server, because they don't trust the mirrors.


We discussed mirroring at the last meeting, and Phil and Pinar
(@myGrid), Eddie and I discussed it at length again the last time we
were in Manchester.  Once we have an agent-based
registration/deregistration mechanism in place, and everyone has
SignatureURLs that resolve to RDF, the problem of keeping registries
synchronized is (almost) trivial!  Just ask one MOBY Central for all of
it's signature URL's, hand those URL's to the agent of another registry,
and let it crawl!  Voila!!

There still needs to be some hierarchy in there, and blah blah, but the
crux of the problem is solved by the RDF signature... I think... we
haven't DONE it yet, so there may be nefarious problems in there that
aren't obvious from a superficial examination of the problem...

Gotta run!  Interviews to do...

M


-- 

--
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics, iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
fax: 604 806 9274

"For most of this century we have viewed communications as a conduit, 
       a pipe between physical locations on the planet. 
What's happened now is that the conduit has become so big and interesting 
      that communication has become more than a conduit, 
       it has become a destination in its own right..."

                Paul Saffo - Director, Institute for the Future