Dear all,
 
There have been some interesting ideas put forward in this thread. The future is bright but nearly all the proposed mechanisms rely on some basic things we don't have yet. Even if we are only considering collecting data from a hand full of data sources and caching them till we go for a coffee break:
  1. Heterogeneous data from multiple sources must fit into a single data model (our cache's data model).
  2. New data that we have never come across before needs to fit in the same model.
  3. Data from different but overlapping domains needs to be linked semantically.
  4. Real world objects need GUIDs so we can link them.
To achieve this pick 'n' mix approach to data we need it all to follow a single low level schema. An RDF approach, backed up with a ontology in OWL or some other technology, is the strongest contender for being able to do this.

We haven't done this yet so the only way to really join data together is in a big data warehouse like GBIF where Donald and his team have to work hard keeping track of the different data standards and mapping them onto their own schema that we can then search. Rod's recent post also gives a good example of the work involved with doing this kind of thing for TreeBASE. I am not saying warehouses will go away with a more RDF like approach but it will become less onerous to collect pools of it to work with.

Roger


Roderic Page wrote:
I wonder whether at some point we need to think carefully about why we
have a distributed model in the first place. Is it the best choice? Did
we chose it, or has it emerged primarily because data providers
want/need to keep control over "their" data?

In the context of bioinformatics, I'm not aware of any large scale
distributed environments that actually work (probably ignorance on my
part). The largest databases (GenBank, PubMed, EMBL, DDBJ) have all the
data stored centrally, and mirror at least some of it (e.g., sequences
are mirrored between GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ). Hence, issues of
synchronisation are largely limited to these big databases, and hence
manageable.

My sense is that there is a lot of computer science research on
federated databases, but few actual large-scale systems that people
make regular use of.

What is present in bioinformatics are large numbers of "value added"
databases that take GenBank,  PubMed, etc. and do neat things with
them. This is possible because you can download the entire database.
Each one of these value added databases does need to deal with the
issue of what happens when GenBank (say) changes, but because GenBank
has well defined releases, essentially they can grab a new copy of the
data, update their local copy, and regenerate their database.

Having access to all the data makes all kinds of things possible which
are harder to do if the data is distributed. I'd argue that part of the
success of bioinformatics is because of data availability.

Hence, my own view (at least today) is:

1. Individual data providers manage their own data, and also make
available their data in the following ways:
i) provide GUIDs and metadata (e.g., LSIDs)
ii) provide a basic, standard search web service
iii) provide their own web interface
iv) periodically provide complete dump of data

2. GBIF (or some equivalent) takes on the job of harvesting all
providers, building a warehouse, and making that data available through
i) web interface
ii) web services
iii) complete data dump

3. Researchers can decide how best to make use of this data. They may
wish to get a complete "GBIF" dump and install that locally, or query
GBIF, or they may wish to query the individual providers for the most
up to date information, or some mixture of this.

Issues of synchronisation are dealt with by GBIF and its providers,
which I think essentially amounts to having versioning and release
numbers (but I'm probably being naive).

Probably 1iv and 3iii are going to cause some issues, and this is off
topic, but if bioinformatics is anything to go by, if we don't make our
data available in bulk we are tying our own hands. However, this is
obviously something each individual provider will have to decide upon
themselves.

My other feeling is that from the point of view of end users (and I
class myself as one) the real game will be services, especially search
(think "Google Life"). And my feeling is that this won't work if
queries are done in a distributed fashion -- the Web is supremely
distributed, but Google doesn't query the Web, it queries its local
copy.

In summary, I think the issue raised by Rich is important, but is one
to be addressed by whoever takes on the task of assembling a data
warehouse from the individual providers. Of course, once providers make
their data available, anybody can do this...

Regards

Rod


------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk
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 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
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 roger@tdwg.org
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