[1] The BioMoby project began at the Model Organism Bring Your own Database Interface Conference (MOBY-DIC), held in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan on September 21, 2001.

It stemmed from a conversation between Mark D Wilkinson and Suzanna Lewis during a Gene Ontology developers meeting at the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, where the functionalities of the Genquire and Apollo genome annotation tools were being discussed and compared.

The lack of a simple standard that would allow these tools to interact with the myriad of data-sources required to accurately annotate a genome was a critical need of both systems.

Thus, between these two ontologies, a service provider and/or a client program can receive a piece of Moby XML, and immediately know both its structure, and its "intent" (semantics).

[2] MOBY Central is aware of the Object, Namespace and Service ontologies, and thus can match consumers who have in-hand Moby data, with service providers who claim to consume that data-type (or some compatible ontological data-type) or to perform a particular operation on it.

As such, the interaction between a consumer and a service provider can be partially or fully automated, as shown in the Gbrowse Moby[3] and Ahab clients respectively.

The Seahawk applet also provides the ability to export a session history as a Taverna workflow, in what constitutes a programming by example functionality.

[4] Given a starting point, it will discover, and execute, every possible BioMOBY service and provide the results in a clickable interface.