[BBF Standards] Deepak's Format Proposal [Re: Two separate standards]

[Ralph Santos]

Deepak,

I think your proposal to try and write out a format is a good idea.  I 
think it would be useful if it were treated a bit like a project or an 
event for the working group:  Set up a wiki page for it, put the 
objectives and any guidelines there, with an empty section to let people 
link in their format writeups.

I'd also be interested to hear what you think should go into a writeup, 
or more broadly what you'd be looking for in a writeup to determine 
whether it is capable of describing all the iGEM projects.  Just to make 
it clear, I'm thinking more along the lines of basic essential 
requirements, not criteria for an optimal solution.  I think that would 
be useful in providing some common basis to compare and contrast the 
submitted writeups.  Of course the people doing the writeups would be 
completely free to address or ignore the criteria you state as they see fit.

Do you have any notions on the format for a writeup?  I could imagine a 
writeup could take on a number of forms:

(1) A set of rules telling a reader how to write an arbitrary system in 
the submitter's format
(2) A set of example descriptions demonstrating by example
(3) A set of *annotated* descriptions made up of examples plus comments 
describing how the  rules are applied in the examples

Of course, there are combinations of the above not to mention other ways 
besides those I mentioned.

What are your thoughts?

---ralf


Deepak Chandran wrote:
> Hello Josh, Drew, and rest,
>
>    While it seems logical to first have standard definitions for 
> promoter, rbs, coding regions, terminators, etc. before working on 
> standards for devices and systems, I think the two are somewhat 
> independent. People have been building biological circuits successfully 
> (iGEM students for example). What I am proposing is for some of us 
> (myself included) to write out a format that can represent all of the 
> iGEM projects. This format can allow others to take iGEM projects (and 
> any other such projects) and connect them together to form larger 
> circuits without having to understand the details of the project itself. 
> All these circuits will be represented in the standard language so that 
> one does not need to reconstruct an entire device to reuse it. I think 
> this is very much possible while the standards on promoters/rbs/etc are 
> still pending. It is also a bit easier maybe, because many concepts can 
> be borrowed from engineering disciplines.
>
> --Deepak
>
>