[MOBY-dev] Cleaning the registry

[jason]

Hi, all

I think some manual clean is needed, too.
For example, there are two text plain data type: text_plain and 
text-plain. I guess there are no difference between these two types. 
Another example is FASTA nucleotide sequence. What type is FASTA 
nucleotide sequence ? It can be FASTA_NA or NucleotideSequence.  Here a 
piece of data can be represented by two types and there is no connection 
between these two types.   If the user thinks his data as FASTA_NA and 
searches for service, he will miss the service for NucleotideSequence.  
Service producing FASTA_NA can not be chained to service accepting 
NucleotideSequence as input. 

This brings up another question: whether uncurated data type management 
works in reality or not.  My understanding is that data type is the 
heart of biomoby. If the data type is not carefully managed, the beauty 
of biomoby only works in theory.


-jason

Andreas Groscurth wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wrote a short script which basically fetches all namespaces and all 
> datatypes registered at the Moby central in Canada. Both are then 
> compared to all datatypes and namespaces of all registered services 
> used for the input and the output definition.
>
> Assuming the retrieval methods in jmoby work correctly and my script 
> does it also we have the following numbers:
>
> Registered Data Types: 721
> Unused Data Types: 388
>
> Registered Namespaces: 459
> Unused Namespaces: 232
>
> This means 53% of all registered datatypes are not used - and 50% of 
> all Namespaces !!!
>
> How do you think about cleaning the registry once in a while and erase 
> unsused datatypes and namespaces ?
>
> Of course they might be useable for a service provider someday, but 
> for the sake of clarity I would suggest to do that. Cleaning both 
> would reduce the number of entries by more than the half, which would 
> result in smaller, more compact, better understandable and better 
> browsable ontologies.
>
> What do you think ?
>
> Cheers
> Andreas
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