Hi,
It occurs to me that the whole issue of informing users about schema
changes in BioMart could be automated. Schema change alerting could be
bundled as part of the standard BioMart package. A user wanting to be
kept informed would register with the BioMart for the relevant database,
providing an email. Once per month, a server would compare the current
schema with the one stored during the previous month. If there are any
differences, these would be mailed to all registered users.
The already-existing BioMart web services make it easy to obtain the
database names, dataset names, attribute names and filter names from a
given host. What would need to be added would be a diff mechanism and
user registration.
For users who don't want to register, BioMart Central could maintain an
automatically generated page, based on the monthly diffs of all member
databases.
Doing things this way would push the onus of keeping informed about
schema changes from the database maintainers to the individual users,
and it might also help to reduce the traffic in the [email protected]
list a bit too!
Cheers,
David Croft.
_______________________________________________
Users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.biomart.org/mailman/listinfo/users
