Hi David, This is interesting. Tool for identifying diff between configurations exists, it's used by some BioMart data source providers for QC purposes before releasing a new version of their data. Yes, it would be good if the diff can be made available to data consumers. At present time, there is no automated way of doing so. It is encouraged for data providers to announce those changes via biomart mailing list.
Looking forward, in future BioMart releases, we are considering to support tracking changes in sophisticated way. Best regards, Junjun On 11-06-10 5:29 AM, "David Croft" <[email protected]> wrote: >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 _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.biomart.org/mailman/listinfo/users
