[MOBY-l] further thoughts on atomic services & service description

[Mark Wilkinson]

Martin Senger wrote:

>    But you need AN agreed way. So pick up one... And because the services
> registered by Moby are Web services, the WSDL is more than reasonable. Or
> say loudly that it is not the case, that the services do not need to be
> web services. 

Can you define "web service" for me, as it seems that we might be 
chasing our semantic tails here...


>>In MOBY (current architechture) the interfaces are described in 
>>ontologies,
>    What do you mean by that? AFAIK the current Moby is defined by Perl
> interfaces. I do not know aht you mean by ontologies in this context.

I mis-spoke somewhat there.  I mean that the *service* interfaces are 
defined by ontologies, not MOBY Central itself (which, as I have said 
numerous times, is NOT a  MOBY service...right now...).

We have two ontologies, one which describes every valid input/output 
data type, and one which describes every valid service "transformation" 
type.  between the two of them, we hope to combinatorially define every 
possible MOBY service (it sound ludicrous when I say it that way... but 
that is the intention...).  The service definition, therefore, is a 
combination of input + transform + output, and may be represented in 
WSDL or any other appropriate language; WSDL being the most obvious one 
for many reasons.  However, the service definintion is not *defined by* 
the WSDL, it is *represented by* the WSDL.  I cannot (currently) create 
a willy nilly WSDL service definitions and force them back into my 
ontology, it is a unidirectional flow -  the ontologies define the 
service, and the WSDL describes it to the world.

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

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