[MOBY-l] thinking about provision info and authoritative service providers

[Martin Senger]

> 
> I was thinking about the use of the word "authority"
>
   It was interesting to read your thoughts about "the right authority". I
agree that assigning an authory to a service may raise the "quality of
service" of any (web) service. However, I do not think that only "some",
or only "those...from" services should be allowed to register in any
directory services, including Moby central.
   Perhaps the obvious solution would be to to the same what succesful web
engine do (especially google, of course): a ranking. The Moby central can
list first services which are used mostly and keep the "obscure" services
at the end of returned lists. The ranking will depend how good and how
optimalized the implementation of Moby central can be - we probably cannot
use exactly the same way how google does (protected know-how) but it still
leaves us with many possible alternatives (starting with the simple
counting how many times a service was asked for).

> 
> The other thing that directly relates to this is versioning information. 
>
   The question is what the service providers will do with different
versions of their services.
   If they provide simply several different services (for example on top
of several versions of GenBank) then all of them should be registered as
separated services by Moby central - with preference to have the version
number in their descriptions. But that's all what Moby central can do with
it because those services simply have different WSDL and/or different
endpoints. So why should Moby central to replicate this information in its
envelope?
   But if the service provider "hides" the service version somewhere in
the service methods (for example, it will be part of the input parameter
defining what database version to work with) then Moby central can do even
less (without interfering with the service real calls - which should be
completely the client task, correct?).
   Or have you in mind some concrete use cases where putting the version
info into the Moby envelope can work?

   Martin

-- 
Martin Senger

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