[Biophp-dev] biophp status

[Serge Gregorio]

BioMoby is at www.biomoby.org.  Its primary aim to integrate the different biological databases out there, a goal not too far from BioPHP's.

Lincoln Stein wrote in a Nature article about three categories of approaches to integration:

   a) Link-level integration
   b) Ontology-driven integration
   c) Database or schema level integration

Link-level integration is too "loose" to be truly useful to biologists.  

Database level integration (coming up with a grand biological database schema) was attempted by one or two groups earlier but failed eventually because of "database churning" (i.e. data providers kept changing their database design, to a point that human intervention became unmanageable).

BioMoby is somewhat in the second category, with the added twist of web services, looks promising.

I may or may not work on it, but if I do, I may be asked to do it in Java.  Well, as they say, who has the gold makes the rules.  So much for being a PHP evangelist.  *laugh out loud*

Regards,

Serge


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