WEB SERVICES

What metadata is required to adequately describe a service?

• author contact
• authority identification
• service version
• software title
  • nature of algorithm (likely = myGrid Task ontology)
• software version
• bandwidth and/or # requests per minute
• example input
• example output and/or REGEXP to test output
• some description of error-handling capacity
• sync/async
• nature of underlying data
  • organism
  • biological nature of data
    • DNA/RNA/Protein
    • SAGE
    • Microarray
      • platform, etc.
• input parameters and purpose of each
• output parameters and purpose of each
• usage/license restrictions
• authentication (is needed or not?)
• usage statistics (as per service provider)
• usage statistics (as per third party commentary)
• protocol (moby, soap, GET, POST, etc.)
• mirrors?

What ontologies exist that could provide this metadata?

•  myGrid Ontology - provides many of the annotation information elements we claim to need. e.g. Model Organism Databases; types/formats of flatfile records
• myGrid ontology also provides an ontology for bioinformatics tasks
• Moby Object - an ontology of data-types
• Moby Service - similar to myGrid's bioinformatics_task branch of the myGrid Ontology

Do we need additional ontologies? Who should make them?

• TBD

What would a service discovery request look like?

• TBD

RECORD IDENTITY

W3C HCLSWG has some recommendations

• these are largely URL-based + various HTTP protocol redirects etc for discovery of metadata

Life Sciences Identifiers

• LSIDs have formal spec for retrieval of both data and metadata
  • LSIDs do not support "REST" access

DOI or other redirect

• ???

 Bio2RDF project & Banff Manifesto

• proposed URI format: bm:namespace:id
  • for example bm:pdb:122345
• Freebase database of data providers and their namespaces
  • Freebase is editable by end-users
  • could be automated v.v. lookup
• Somehow map bm:pdb:122345 to its equivalent URL
• can we convince NAR to do this, since it has a list of all databases?