[MOBY-l] Request for BioMoby support letters

[Paul Gordon]

Hi all,

By the process of variable unification in first-order logic,
you can very easily solve problems like "John lives next to Betty, Betty 
does not
have green eyes, Phil is twice as old as Betty, etc....  What color are 
John's eyes?"
If you have programmed in Prolog, you will know what I mean. 
Essentially, MOBY 1.0 is procedural, and MOBY 2.0 is declarative logic.

The MOBY 2.0 idea (Mark, correct if I'm wrong), is to load up the 
appropriate
facts (propositions) from services as they are needed to check the truth 
of a
statement (scientific hypothesis).  These facts are not necessarily from 
a database,
it could be that a service returns a proposition like "ing1 and yng1 are 
orthologs"
based on a BLAST you did on your server.  Such a service would be declared
with a signature:

"I return facts of the form 'X and Y are orthologs'"

> Effectively, the idea is that we can execute BioMoby-like services (that  
> consume/generate RDF) inline with SPARQL queries and/or as part of OWL  
> reasoning; the query is resolved after the required services are  
> discovered and executed.  This allows you to pose queries over data that  
> does not exist at the time you constructed the query - the data  
> "automagically" becomes available as a result of the question you asked.   
> One could also think of it as query-based workflow construction, or  
> model-is-workflow in the case of OWL.
>