Hello Tobias,

Please pardon some naive comments below - I'm new to the discussion...

Is this the format you're interested in:

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/arff.html

What kind of support exists for it? If support is sparse, who benefits most from exposing resources in that representation?

After a quick peek, there doesn't seem to be anything there that can't be done with good ol' XHTML and JSON. Worse, ARFF doesn't look like it supports hypertext, a cornerstone of all RESTful APIs:

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven

It's only been recently that folks have started to pay attention to hypertext when developing RESTful APIs (although browsers have worked this way from the beginning). A lot of the discussion is pretty abstract. For some examples that apply to science, see:

The RESTful Chemical Tracking System Series:
http://depth-first.com/articles/2009/08/07/the-restful-chemical-tracking-system-part-1-introduction

The Chemcaster API:
http://chemcaster.com/rest

See also the Sun Cloud API:
http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/Home

In all three examples, you'll notice a high priority placed on crafting domain-specific media types based on standard data formats like XHTML and JSON.

How does Open Tox approach this issue?

Best,
Rich

___________________________________

Richard L. Apodaca

http://depth-first.com      Blog
http://metamolecular.com    Company


--- On Fri, 9/25/09, Tobias Girschick <tobias.girschick at in.tum.de> wrote:

> From: Tobias Girschick <tobias.girschick at in.tum.de>
> Subject: [OTDev] ARFF mime type
> To: development at opentox.org
> Date: Friday, September 25, 2009, 3:53 AM
> Dear all,
> 
> in Rome we were talking very shortly about a (at the
> moment
> non-existing) MIME type for arff files. Would it be
> possible to agree on
> something like 
> text/arff 
> although this type does officially not exist? Is there an
> alternative? 
> Cases where this MIME type will be of use are, for example
> if I want to
> retrieve a dataset via GET from /dataset/{id} in ARFF
> format.
> 
> Any comments?
> 
> Regards,
> Tobias
> -- 
> Dipl.-Bioinf. Tobias Girschick
> 
> Technische Universität München
> Institut für Informatik
> Lehrstuhl I12 - Bioinformatik
> Bolzmannstr. 3
> 85748 Garching b. München, Germany
> 
> Room: MI 01.09.042
> Phone: +49 (89) 289-18002
> Email: tobias.girschick at in.tum.de
> Web: http://wwwkramer.in.tum.de/people/girschic
> 
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