[MOBY] [MOBY-l] Interpreting results from Service->execute()

[Frank Gibbons]

José María,

Thanks for your response.

>The larger one: EBI-141 is an IntAct identifier, which corresponds to an 
>interactor in this case (P53905 from UniProt).
>
>The service was designed thinking on protein ids because we are 
>integrating data both from IntAct and other sources (like REGIA or VPiL). 
>So, the identifier is not found and the method returns nothing... Also, it 
>doesn't belong to any of the accepted input namespaces (AGI_LocusCode, 
>Swiss-Prot, SPTR, TrEMBL)

In fact, I just figured this out. There must be an easy way to find out the 
required input/output for a service. In my ignorance, I resorted to going 
to that MOBY-S web-page that lets you select input data types, then shows 
what services accept that type. I selected each protein type in sequence, 
until I found your services. But since there are at least half a dozen 
different protein ID systems, it gets complicated. I guess I could have 
written a script to iterate through them all, then iterate through the 
services I'm interested in, to find one that works. But shouldn't it be 
possible, once I know which service I'm interested in, to figure out what 
input it's looking for? I'm thinking specifically in terms of finding out 
what are the acceptable namespaces. Of course, I'm sure it is possible 
(wouldn't it be in the WSDL?) - anyone care to point me to a description of 
this? :)

>But it is true, there are two bugs: one related to signal an invalid 
>namespace, and other related to say 'no output'. I'm fixing them since now.
>
>>
>>The simpler answer might be that the service isn't working properly ;-)

This raises an issue that would seem to increase in importance as the 
number of available services increases: if a service either doesn't work 
properly (someone puts it up prematurely, for example), or doesn't work at 
all (it worked a while ago, but something broke, and nobody is fixing it), 
how are service consumers to know? This is especially true if the response 
for unrecognized input data is simply an empty message. Should there be a 
meta-service, that rates the other services in terms of reliability, 
percentage time that it's up, length of service, or other criteria? I'm not 
imagining that it would "Service A is much better than Service B", merely 
that "Service C was last reported working successfully on January 19, 
2002." or "Service D has responded to 97% of all requests in the last 
week." Maybe there is something like this already?

Anyway, thanks to you (and to Mark) for setting me straight.

-Frank


PhD, Computational Biologist,
Harvard Medical School BCMP/SGM-322, 250 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115, USA.
Tel: 617-432-3555       Fax: 
617-432-3557       http://llama.med.harvard.edu/~fgibbons