MOBY-S 0.86.3 API

This document (updated August 22, 2005) describes the API for MOBY-S, the web-services based branch of BioMOBY. The API is both an abstract description of the capabilities of each component of MOBY, as well as a concrete description (in XML) of the messages that may be sent between those components. As a potential end-user of MOBY-S, you will need an implementation of this API in your language of choice. You can check out the source code for the BioMOBY project here.

We can view the API as coming in two parts:
  1. The registry API, describing how to interact with the MOBY Central registry. MOBY Central stores the object and services ontologies, and provides discovery services for service consumers.
  2. The service API, which describes how to interact with a service provided under the MOBY framework: it describes what messages you can send to a service, how should they be structured, how the service should interpret them, and what the proper responses are.
There are several other sections to this document, which may be useful, depending on your level of interest in the internal workings of MOBY-S:

Recent changes to MOBY API

registerService and calling the RDF Agent

The registerService behaviour has been extended to allow deregistration through a call to the RDF agent. This is achieved by calling registerService with only the signatureURL parameter filled. When a service is registered with a signatureURL the host is expected to have a Signature RDF document containing one or more service signatures residing at that URL. To deregister a service, simply remove the mygrid:serviceDescription block of the service you wish to deregister from that RDF document, and call MOBY Central's registerService method with the signatureURL of the modified RDF document. The agent will discover the service is missing from the document, and deregister it from the registry. Similarly with updates - simply modify the Signature RDF and call registerService with that URL.

How to report errors in MOBY.

The MOBY developers recently ratified a proposal on exception-reporting, submitted by Integrated Bioinformatics group at Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática in Málaga, Spain.

A number of issues are the subject of current discussion on the MOBY-S developers' mailing list. Among them are:
  • What is the procedure for handling changes to the API (RFC's)? Here is one suggestion.
  • Should articleName be mandatory or not?
You can participate more fully in the MOBY-S community by subscribing to the general discussion or the developers mailing list. You can also report a bug or request a new feature