[BBF Standards] data exchange -- say no to web services

[Bryan Bishop]

On Monday 11 February 2008, Raik Gruenberg wrote:
> > The number of web service providers in the field of bioinformatics
> > is
>
>  > increasing every year. In theory, these services are interoperable
> and > independent of specific computer languages. However, each
> service uses its own > definition of data types and method naming
> conventions. Moreover, > theseservices are often not usable by
> specific languages (partly, due to the > lack of compliance of the
> SOAP/WSDL specification in the language's library).
>
> ... and then they need to fix up the mess with an extra layer of
> ontologies of web services while the actual data seem to remain
> undescribed and disconnected.

Interesting. There are two websites out there that I would like to 
mention (as well as Freebase, though I do not know about its 
relevance). In particular, check out these groups:

http://dataportability.org/ (more for social networks)
http://theinfo.org/ -- for processing large datasets.

A good first step might be to make the bioinformatics databases expose 
MySQL/PostgreSQL interfaces to the public for automated querying. Would 
this be useful?

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/