Large SOAP Attachments

One problem of webservices is sending large data chunks around - something you want to minimise. Not only for performance, but also because long transmissions may break. SOAP attachments are not ideal. One way to avoid sending data through SOAP is to send by reference, e.g. through the use of a URI (LSID) referral - which will delay fetching data until the last moment and may be optimised, e.g. through a bittorrent download (as discussed on Bio.share/Bio.slurp).

Biomoby has proposed a mechanism to allow parts of the moby data to be referenced to achieve this in their framework. The reference types can be advertised in the moby central metadata registry and therefore made available to clients such as Taverna.

We note that creating a service which accepts or creates references is not actually that hard - the hard part is to advertise this capability, specifically that technologies such as WSDL have no way to say 'this input has schema type XXX' when the input is a reference rather than a value.