[MOBY-dev] Primitives as primary input

[Tom Oinn]

Paul Gordon wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> No, you shouldn't be able to (unless you guarantee that you know how to 
> decode every URL type ever possible, including prospero, gopher, ftp, 
> etc., since that's the contract you're making).

True, but that's splitting hairs - the problem still exists if I 
explicitly say 'HTTP URL'.

> P.S. I'm not generally a fan of namespace inheritance, but if we did it, 
> an application that fits the bill for you would be to have URN -> URI -> 
> URL -> httpURL ->PNGhttpURL. 

My point was that the above is inherently broken. It's a multi-axial 
classification (transport, content) shoehorned into a single heirarchy 
and, like the GO, ends up with an utter mess. The mess comes when I *do* 
want to allow multiple URL types (most toolkits will quite happily 
handle all the common ones) and you end up with a cut and paste 
heirarchy full of structural duplication (and thence errors over time) 
because of the failure to differentiate these two axes of classification.

I should be able to specify the content (an image) required or produced 
by the service independantly from the delivery or consumption mechanism. 
If I were a user searching for services which accepted an image (in this 
case) I would definitely expect to see ones that accepted a URL to an 
image - the mechanics of providing the appropriate access mechanism are 
a different concern entirely.

I don't think you can sensibly do this in moby at the moment but it 
would be fairly high on my wishlist, especially because Taverna2 is 
designed to take advantage of multiple alternative reference systems to 
optimise network usage. If a future moby could handle this sensibly 
workflows would run much faster and with much less load on both your 
network and your services.

Tom