From: Srinivas JONNALAGADDA <srinivas.j@...>
Date: 2006-07-08T15:26:42+09:00
Subject: Re: ASN.1 for Ruby

Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> ASN.1 is one of those binary formats that grew out of ISO. It's lack
> of popularity can perhaps be attributed to the lack of popularity for
> other ISO things like X.400 (ISO MOTIS) mail.

JS: Several of the biological and chemical databases compiled by NCBI
    use ASN.1 format. For backward compatibility, they also provide flat
    files. However, for newer software, ASN.1 format is recommended.

> Is anyone actually interested in ASN.1 support for Ruby? I implemented
> enough of it for LDAP in the Net::LDAP library, in a reasonably
> encapsulated
> way so it could be abstracted into its own package. I'd be happy to do this
> if anyone has a use for it.

JS: It would be great to have a Ruby library to parse and search such
    biological and chemical databases in ASN.1 format. For now, since I
    do not have the time to develop one, I am using their flat file
    format.

You could take a look at
http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Sitemap/samplerecord.html to see a sample of the
data in flat format.

Please send an e-mail to me offline, should you feel that you could
extract and complete your library.

Best regards,

JS