Although I'm not perfectly certain about the computer industry really
going for UDDI (for instance, HP refuses to join, as usual ;-) a new
standard for locating scientific, free information and computing
services would be valuable.
For the kind of entities you mention, sequence annotations, references
etc, there are already quite a few XML definitions and several efforts
along the lines. There are in fact so many nice XML, ASN.1 and CORBA
defined information and service initiatives are issued from different
labs and associations
that a unifying framework for locating them could really save a lot of
hassle.
Although I have not delved very deep into this, perhaps the W3C
suggested Resource Descripiton Framework (RDF) may prove an interesting
platform in this form of integration (see http://www.w3.org/RDF/ and
http://www.w3.org/Metadata/)?
I think the RDF Interest Group is supposed to discuss the possibility of
a resource-discovery protocol based on RDF? Does anyone know if this has
gotten anywhere?
That would make it possible to search for a service, get it and check
for services compatible with your own - in essence pretty much what UDDI
is about, isn't it?
// Daniel
cdpaulse at my-deja.com wrote:
> With the computer industry consolidating on
> Universal Description Discovery and Integration
> as a standard for information exchange, it seems
> wise to persue this as a possible framework for
> the exchange of scientific information.
>> Is there an initiative to encapsulate information
> such as sequence annotations, literature
> references and the like using this specification?
--
Daniel Nilsson <daniel.nilsson at genpat.uu.se>
Sysadmin and student
Dept. of Genetics and Pathlogy, Uppsala University
