The History of MOBY-S
The Moby project began at the Model Organism Bring Your own Database Interface Conference (MOBY-DIC), held in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan on September 21, 2001.
It stemmed from a conversation I had with Suzi Lewis at a Gene Ontology develpers meeting at Stanford where we were comparing the functionalities of Genquire and Apollo genome annotation tools. At the time, both Genquire and Apollo were hard-coded to talk to their own databases, despite having almost identical functionality. This annoyed me 🙂 It seemed obvious that there was an enormous waste of resources in having two functionally similar annotation systems that could only talk to one database! I said to myself, “Self, there must be a better way!”. I returned home to the PBI-NRC and asked my post-doctoral supervisor Bill Crosby if he would support me hosting a meeting of model organism database providers to consider ways of making our database interfaces interoperable. He agreed, and that gave birth to the first MOBY-DIC meeting. We have had (as of December, 2005) seven MOBY-DIC meetings, and at each meeting the BioMOBY specification becomes more elaborate and better defined.
Membership is OPEN! Please join us!!!