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

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Phillip" == Phillip Lord <p.lord at russet.org.uk> writes:

>>>>> "Mark" == mwilkinson <mwilkinson at gene.pbi.nrc.ca> writes:

  Mark> Hi all,

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

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

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

  Mark> How does myGrid deal with this?

  Phil> We argue about it, and wonder which is best!

  Phil> At the moment its an open issue for us. We are worried
  Phil> about the amount of traffic that will go between the server
  Phil> and an ontology driven query interface to the server.


Well I did say it was an open issue. As you probably noticed my answer
was almost totally different from Chris's....


Phil