Re: [Treebase-devel] ABI proposal for phyloinformatics

[Hilmar L. <hl...@ne...>]

Jim:

On Jun 7, 2011, at 1:30 PM, Jim Leebens-Mack wrote:

> I am a bit concerned about the tight connection between TB and  
> ToLWeb that is outlined in the pitch.  Are folks intending to re- 
> engineer BOTH TB and ToLWeb?  In my mind, ToLWeb would be just one  
> of many platforms from which folks may want to delve into the  
> phylogenetic knowledge that could be accessed in TreeBASE.


Good points, and indeed what I had in mind technically(*). The way I  
am envisioning this to be implemented is indeed using technologies  
(HTTP/REST APIs, canonical resolvable identifiers, RDF) that allow  
very loose coupling. I left that out as I thought the tech soup  
shouldn't be in there, but I agree what's missing now is the notion  
that this will be achieved through loose coupling.

So as for reengineering, the idea is to engineer (or reengineer where  
that's necessary) components for *both* systems that allow that loose  
coupling in a way that achieves the stated goals. Components that need  
not change to achieve this would not be touched.

	-hilmar

(*)  Socially (as opposed to technically), I think ToLWeb can, and  
should, play a much more important role in enhancing TreeBASE content  
in the sense of turning data into knowledge than other platforms that  
we would enable here. Perhaps a useful analogy to think about is  
Genbank as the the raw sequence data repository and NCBI Gene (and its  
predecessor LocusLink) as well as RefSeq as resources that attempt to  
turn this into curated knowledge.
-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
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