[MOBY-dev] A message to ensure transparency

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi All,

we're starting a research project in my lab that looks at better ways to  
discover appropriate web services and combinations of web services.  One  
way we want to pursue is to log MOBY Central usage such that we can better  
prioritize the output of a findService call to MOBY Central (e.g. 9/10  
people chose THIS service as their next step).

To do this effectively I will be adding a "listener" to MOBY Central such  
that it records and catalogues the retrieveService requests from  
individual IP addresses in order to track usage behaviour and make better  
search outputs.  I will hash the IP address so that I cannot easily go  
back and look-up who made the request - it isn't 100% private/secure, but  
frankly we're not interested in who requested the service, only in which  
service they requested immediately before and afterwards... besides, I  
suspect that anyone who was *that* concerned about privacy would have  
set-up their own mirror of MOBY Central :-)

In any case, I wanted to make sure that there were no violent objections  
to me doing this before I do it.

Please let me know, and if I hear no objections I'll add a line into the  
"Policy" document associated with the Vancouver MOBY Central on the  
homepage.

Cheers all!

M


-- 
--
Mark Wilkinson
Assistant Professor, Dept. Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre, St. Paul's Hospital

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