MOBY-S Authorities
What is a MOBY-S Authority?
A BioMOBY authority is anyone who designed an item registered in the public MOBY-S ontologies. Currently there are ontologies for:
- Namespaces
- Objects
- Service types
- Services
For services the authority is usually also the service provider hosting a service.
If you register a new item in one of the ontologies that make up BioMOBY Central, you'll have to choose a label or URI (see below)
that uniquely identifies you. Furthermore you'll have to specify an e-mail address so BioMOBY developers and users can contact you
in case they have problems using the item you registered. Preferably supply an e-mial address or alias that will still be used
for your institute's BioMOBY services/objects/namespaces long after you have left the project and a colleague has taken over.
Objects and namespaces can only be registered once. Services with the same name however can be registered more than once as long as
the combination of service name and service authority are unique. Registering a service with the same name, but hosted by another
authority implies it's a perfect mirror. Hence services with the same name are expected to provide exactly the same operation or
exacly the same data.
Currenly there is no mechanism in place though to check whether two services with the same name are indeed perfect mirrors.
Choosing an URI that identifies you as a MOBY-S Authority
Basically an
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)
could be anything as long as it is a unique label to identify a resource. URLs are the most common form of URIs.
An URL not only identifies a certain resource, but also describes how to access that resource.
MOBY-S authority URIs should be
Full Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs).
Preferably ones that point to a website with additional information about the MOBY-S authority when the domain is prefixed with
'http://'. Hence, prefixing a BioMOBY authority with 'http://' should yield an URL.
Some examples:
BioMOBY service providers on the BioMOBY globe
On the BioMOBY homepage there is a map visualising the world wide distribution of BioMOBY services.
This map is automatically updated at least once a day.
If you registered one or more services, a coloured dot should appear on the map after some time.
If you are not on the map after 24 hours please check that:
- Your authority URI is a full qualified domain name as described above
- Your full qualified domain name resolves to an IP address, that is known in the GeoTargeting database from
www.hostip.info.
You can check this on the www.hostip.info web site and
if necessary update the information for your IP address.