[MOBY-l] lengthy missive on MOBY status after ISMB/I3C

[Matt Links]

> >  If
> > your ontology, for instance, does not distinguish between a Blast
> > service which takes a sequence, and one which takes an ID, you could
> > give the wrong stuff to the wrong service.
> 
> I don't think this can happen if you are using MOBY corectly.  Only
> services that *can* use your input will be presented to you if you pose
> the query based on your in-hand object type.
> 
> 
> > Or you could give an ID to
> > the wrong database, such as giving an SWISS-PROT id to a TAIR only
> > search facility.
> 
> again, since service providers register both the object types *and* the
> namespaces that they deal with, this should never happen either... touch
> wood!

This sounds like the same problem of 'service-confidence'.  The warranted 
belief a client has of a given service actually doing what it has said it 
would.  In this case the issue should go-away because of the way 
namespaces are being used.  However, trying to know up front which objects 
within a namespace are going to lead to results is not something we can 
know?  Is this where the real problem is?  In trying to tell which regions 
of a namespace are better for a specific service than other regions of a 
namespace?

> > Or is there a
> > more generic problem that you haven't worked out how to link parts of
> > a "multi-part" query, to parts of a multi-part answer, whether that
> > answer is a result, or a failure report?
> 
> precisely.

I don't see where the problem is here.  I think that if you simply keep 
things ordered there isn't a problem.  You do need a way to delineate the 
records but that seems to be relatively trivial to solve (input order is 
the same as output order).

Matt