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

[Mark Wilkinson]

Martin Senger wrote:


> 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.

We certainly never planned to regulate things in this way!  However, we 
have to make it possible for someone to state that they are "the" 
authority on a certain data transformation.


>    Perhaps the obvious solution would be to to the same what succesful web
> engine do (especially google, of course): a ranking.


My colleages and I here at PBI have been joking about this with each 
other for the past year.  We imagined a scenario where the user gets a 
message like "you wanna do a Blast?  Four out of Five leading 
bioinformaticians chose NCBI to do their blasts!  What will YOU chose?"

All joking aside, though, I personally don't think this is something 
that we necessarily want to build into MOBY itself.  I'm trying to keep 
the MOBY layer as thin and simple as possible.  A MOBY Google service 
could perhaps be built on top of MOBY, but should not be part of MOBY 
itself IMO.

>    The question is what the service providers will do with different
> versions of their services.

currently, they simply change the database without telling you... for 
the most part.  I rarely see any indication of the "version" of a 
database in the CGI interfaces.  In fact, I suspect that many of the 
databases are simply "live" - that they are constantly being updated and 
  modified, and that there is no such thing as a database "version" 
(Lukas, is this the case for TAIR?  Chris, is this the case for Flybase? 
  or do you actually have database releases with corresponding version 
numbers?)


>    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.

I doubt that this will ever be the case for most services.  It is 
unlikely that e.g. Genbank will keep archives of the entire database for 
every release in order to allow services to be run on archived data...

>    Or have you in mind some concrete use cases where putting the version
> info into the Moby envelope can work?

Not only do I think it can work, I think it *must* be so!  As I 
discussed above, let's assume that service providers simply change the 
underlying database without changing the interface and without 
re-registering with MOBY Central (as they do now with their CGI 
interfaces). Something has to be sent back to the end-user telling them 
what version of the data was used to generate their result object. 
Putting the database version number somewhere in the result object seems 
to be not only desirable, but necessary!

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 dot com