Is Biomoby Dead And What Happened To Its Purported Successor Semantic Moby?

Question

[Joachim]

It appears that BioMoby (http://biomoby.open-bio.org/) has been discontinued, because their news feed has not been updated since 2008 anymore. Does someone know whether anyone has picked up on that project and continued it?

On the BioMoby web-page, there is also a link-out to Semantic MOBY (http://biomoby.open-bio.org/index.php/semantic-moby/), but the web-site http://semanticmoby.org/ does not exist. Has there been any further development on that service?

Thanks, Joachim

[Thaman]

It seems like dead!

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

You should check this again, in a few hours/days.

When I went to Biohackathon2009, many Japanese people were using Taverna+biomoby. Furthermore, I think Mark Wilkinson's team is now working on SADI: http://sadiframework.org

Answer 2

[Lars Juhl Jensen]

As far as I can see BioMoby is not discontinued per se, however, no further development is going into it. It is so to speak a finished project that runs itself rather than a dead project. The people behind it have no intention of closing BioMoby, but are now investing their time on SADI.

Here is a brief except from what I have been able to find online to support this (link):

Mon Jun 28 2010 20:48:44 GMT+0200 (CEST)

Hi all,

As you know, we switched the BioMoby website to Wordpress several years ago. We've just noticed that the WP installation has been compromised, and unfortunately the update to a more secure version of Wordpress is not a trivial process!

So... I'm now wondering what we should do with the website. I must admit that I rarely use it - I do look at the interactive map from time-to-time, and the list of papers and software is often useful to refer to... but the bloggy-aspect of the site is something that I simply never use (and it hasn't been updated in quite a while!)

From my perspective, the Moby project is "finished", and I have personally moved-on to the newer SADI interoperability framework project (and I hope many Moby'ers will maked this move also!!) so other than archival I have no personal interest in maintaining the current biomoby website, but maybe others do? Does anyone have an interest in any of the biomoby.org website content? If so, please let me know which "bits" are useful/interesting to you and I will create an archive of those pieces on a simple, straightforward set of web pages. Those bits that nobody has an interest in will simply be taken down, I think. We don't have time/manpower at the moment to do a Wordpress upgrade, and having a compromised site on open-bio is not something we can ignore!

The biomoby domain, however, is still required as we have a ton of proxying happening via that domain name, so the domain will remain up and running. All we really need to do is take WordPress down, while keeping any useful bits of the Wordpress site available in some simple page-form.

Let me know what you all think.

Best wishes!

Mark

P.S. If anyone is interested, we ran the stats the other day - the Moby Central registry hosted in Canada was hit >800,000 times in the past year, and the BioMoby services that we host here were hit almost 1.4 Million times in the past 12 months!! ...so... the project is still pretty active for sure!!