[MOBY-dev] Changing only the description of an ontolgy entry

[Tom Oinn]

Martin Senger wrote:
>> No and for good reasons.
> 
> 
> IMHO, well no, not really a good reason. In BioMoby, descriptions are just
> descriptions, they have nothing to do with ontology (like data types,
> namespaces, etc.). If I change its description, a service still has the same
> behaviour.
> 
> I agree with you in one point, however. *Any* change, even a change in
> typos, should be reflected in the LSID revision, and, consequently, in all
> dependent LSID revisions (in the same way as it would be done by the long
> procedure of de- and re-registering). But because such change does not
> change behaviour of services and, therefore, does not jeopardize any
> clients, the all revision changes could be done hiddenly, by the registry
> code - which would guarantee the "atomicity" of such operation (which we
> cannot achieve easily from the clients).

As I understood the LSID specification metadata is allowed to be 
mutable, couldn't you use this to create an indication in the metadata 
that there was a more up to date description? I'd have thought this 
would have been in the metadata anyway rather than the data part of the 
LSID but I don't know Moby particularly well so am probably wrong (given 
this discussion).

Tom