[Taverna-users] Re: [MOBY-l] Biomoby and Taverna 1.2

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Oinn <tmo at ebi.ac.uk> writes:


  Tom> Could someone, for example Phil, who actually knows what
  Tom> they're talking about on these lists perhaps give an example of
  Tom> how this would look in RDF? I know it's possible to do but a
  Tom> concrete example might be helpful and I don't have the required
  Tom> knowledge.



I'm not sure that I would make any claims to be the worlds greatest
expert on RDF. Actually, I would make claims to not be any kind of
expert on RDF. 

You can certainly express the notion of a collection in RDF. You can
put semantic types onto any of the nodes underneath this, and there is
very little restriction as to what the types of these things can
be. You can state that for a rdf:bag that the first is a dna sequence,
the next a protein or whatever. The rdf looks something like


a  ---- has type ---> bag

a  ---- li ----> b
a  ---- li ----> c


b  ---- hastype -----> dna sequence
b  ---- hasvalue -----> "GATC"


c ---- hastype ---> protein sequence
c ---- hasvalue ---> "MAGSYDJ"


If you want this level of complexity in moby-s messages then there is
no particular problem within representing it in the XML, at least as
far as I can see. The problem comes from querying, because people are
likely to want to query for services which consume, for example,
"DNASequence, or some collection which recursively contains a DNA
sequence". 

Neither moby-central nor feta are going to be terribly happy with
performing this sort of query. 

Phil