Biomoby Web Service Display Page

WebServiceRetrieval.js requires:
jquery.pack.js - v1.2.3 or later
jquery.form.js -v2.12 or later
jquery.selectboxes.pack.js

With regards to biomoby rifraf: Progress is made on the BioMoby Web Service Annotation Page. Finished making the javascript file (WebServiceRetrieval.js) to display a Web Service's descriptive information. Because the RDF graph for a Web Service can get pretty deep and because we want to pull out a lot of information, it slows down the query I've noticed and causes timeouts when accessing it remotely the way we're doing it. Had to break down the query into steps.

1) Query using a web service uri to get its immediate service description, organization description and operation uid
2) Query using the operation uid to get the operation task
3) Query using the operation uid to get the operation Input parameters
4) Query using the operation uid to get the operation Output parameters

Using ajax calls to submit a form containning the SPARQL queries, the script executes the Query 1 and pulls out the Operation uid. Query 2-4 use the operation uid and are all called at approximately the same time (as in they don't wait for one to complete before executing the other since they're all their own seperate ajax call)

Using the jquery form plugin to do the ajax calls which allows the script to work in all browsers: Firefox3, Safari, Opera and IE7.

Small catch: Need to talk to the guys who handle the Virtuoso server where I'm getting this Web Service description RDF as JSON from. Because ajax doesn't let you do cross domain requests for json (which we're doing) UNLESS you set datatype: jsonp.

When datatype is set to jsonp, jquery ajax sends an extra 'callback' parameter in the request to the server. This 'callback' parameter is usually has a value like eg. jsonp7120986. The server is suppose to take that and wrap it's response JSON in it like so:
jsonp7120986( {responseJSON} ) and set the response to text/plain.

If the server just sends back {responsJSON} without it being wrapped, it will cause an 'invalid label' error.

Our SPARQLEndpoint currently doesn't do this and I've been getting around it (so that I could keep coding) by making an intermediate java class which would wrap the JSON response in the callback. I'm sure the guys managing our SPARQL Endpoint will be able to help.



Now to make it look intuitive and beautiful...

biomoby rifraf

At some point in the next few weeks we will be building/using a customized ED web page to conduct an experimental annotation jamboree on the biomoby web services.  We will be both measuring the differences in collected data between normal social tagging and semantic social tagging and providing a new layer of annotation for the biomoby framework.

The soon-to-be-created biomoby service annotation web page is an example of one application of the ED code (now available on Google code).   We hope that others will find many more uses for it over time.  When its ready, the little web page that could will

1. Request a JSON representation of the RDF describing a biomoby web service from a new SPARQL endpoint containing the BioMoby service graph.  See here for an RDF/XML rendition of such a service description.
2. Display the available information about the service in a reasonably intuitive and beautiful fashion.
3. Allow the user to tag the service with either semantic tags (e.g. from the service ontology or elsewhere) or free text tags.
4. Send the tagging information to the ED RDF repository.

The question of what exactly to collect and why is still a little vague however.  Why and how would tags, semantic or otherwise, be useful in the biomoby system?

Moby2.0 developer Luke McCarthy requested that the service tags focus on defining what might be reasonable semantic relationships (predicates) between the input and the output of the service.  An example might be for a a basic blast service, service input a) 'is homologous to' service output b).  

Any other suggestions regarding service semantics of interest warmly requested and appreciated.

-BG