[MOBY-l] MOBY at NCGR/CSHL- intro to ISYS and its conceptual relationship to MOBY

[Mark Wilkinson]

next morning...

>This seems to be somewhat at odds with the
>picture that is presented in the moby_classes.txt file 
>
Sorry, my mistake - this file *does* belong in the CVS, as it is Lukas' 
first draft of a set of basic objects and their relationships.  I got 
this confused with a file I have locally which has (in a single 
monolithic file) the draft versions of the XSD definitions of all object 
classes I have attempted so far.

I guess we were on a slipperly slope, in that we are trying to guess 
what is the most fundamental piece of information to be included in an 
object (e.g. Sequence objects carry Sequence, and Citation objects carry 
Author/Publication information) without getting into the MAGE-ML scale 
of modelling where you want everything that is known about a piece of 
data to be inlcuded in the model.  It's a tricky game to play, I agree, 
though I don't think it is yet proven if we have succeeded or failed, as 
we don't have enough services nor use cases to make any conclusions.  I 
think we *can* make some pretty accurate guesses about what the "basic" 
information requested will be...  To go along the other path strikes me 
as dangerous, actually.  If we don't structure the data in some 
predictable way, but rather 'bag it' (as I understand you are proposing 
- correct me if I am misunderstanding), then we are quite literally 
forced to go the route you proposed were the service must examine the 
content of the 'bag' to see if it can do anything with it.  This worries 
me...  I caught the tail end of a meeting of the I3C a couple of weeks 
ago and walked in on a conversation about exactly these kinds of issues 
- the advocate was arguing quite strongly and convincingly that 
structured data is the only way that the problem is going to be solved, 
otherwise we end up with a similar (but less severe) problem to what we 
have now with scraping CGI pages to get at only the pieces that we want, 
though granted ours will be at least somewhat self descriptive...

I guess I need you to give me an example of  what you are proposing, 
since I might be fanning my flies without having a clear understanding 
of what you are saying.

Cheers!

Mark