From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-07-09T04:11:44+09:00
Subject: Re: ASN.1 for Ruby

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The thing about ASN.1 is that it's not a grammar. It's actually a
grammar-grammar, so it always makes use of an context-specific data
definition for each domain. Has NCBI published one for theirs?

On 7/8/06, Srinivas JONNALAGADDA <srinivas.j@siritech.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>

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