[MOBY-l] Which machine deals with ontology issues?

[mwilkinson at gene.pbi.nrc.ca]

Hi all,

Now that there are a handful of services up and running, the issues
around dealing with our wonderful Object/Service ontologies are becoming
clearer to me.  I'm wondering if anyone has opinions about whether
ontologies should be a Client/Service issue, or if they should be dealt
with at MOBY-Central?

e.g. I query MOBY central with an input Object-type.  Does it respond
only with the services that deal with that object type, or does it track
down the parentage of that Object and tell me the services that deal
with that object type and its parents?  Similarly, does a Service accept
*any* type of object, and skim-off the information that it understands
based on the ontology, or does it restrict itself to only dealing with
*exactly* the type of object that it is registererd to deal with, and
reject everything else?

I think these questions arise whether or not we have a separate
ontology-server (i.e. rip ontology-awareness out of the MOBY-Central
itself - which seems like a good idea in any case), as it remains
ambiguous who has the responsibility for dealing with the ontologies -
server, client, or Central?

How does myGrid deal with this?  other opinions?  I'd like to keep
things as far away from the Server end as possible, since one of the
"founding principles" was that service-creation should be mindless... At
the same time, I worry that there is going to be too much pounding on
MOBY-Central...

These seem like important questions which we need to address *soon*,
since we are already building both clients and services, and the pace at
which Services are appearing is increasing daily!!  Making a decision
now, even if it is viewed as an experiment, would be a good thing.

M



--
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"Speed is subsittute fo accurancy."
________________________________

Dr. Mark Wilkinson, RA Bioinformatics
National Research Council, Plant Biotechnology Institute
110 Gymnasium Place, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

phone : (306) 975 5279
pager : (306) 934 2322
mobile: markw_mobile at illuminae.com