View the Mobysphere!
By Simon • May 10th, 2005 • Category: Semantic Web & Web Services, Tools
In an idle moment at the MOBY-DIC meeting last weekend (developers meeting for the BioMOBY project), I downloaded the list of service authorities from MOBY-Central and hunted down their latitude and longitude coordinates using their IP addresses and various online ip-to-latlong servers. I threw all this data into a free Flash mapping tool (DIY Map) and out came a map of where in the world are the MOBY services. You can view this online here, you can download the files as a tar.gz archive also. The map could be colored to show use of services (color code each country according to number of accesses to MOBY-Central. You can draw lines/arcs between locations so you could even display the geographic route taken to run a complex workflow in Taverna. Not much practical value perhaps but it would look cool!
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That Moby map is truly sweet. It should absolutely be integrated into the BioMOBY website and updated automatically on a daily basis.
Its missing a bunch of services at the moment - probably because they are running on external moby-centrals. Australia definitley has some and so does the Philippines.
All it has right now are the services in the main MOBY Central so Im sure its missing some. The automatic updating could be done but the trick is getting the latitude & longitude for the service. I used some free IP to Lat/Long pages IpLocator and ip2location to get these values but you can only use them for free a limited number of times. You can subscribe to their service and have unlimited use - great for tracking queries to MOBY central too, that would make a nice display to layer on the map. Perhaps the Australian and Phillipino contingents could just send in some stats on # of services and their lat/long so we can add them to the map.