Re: agents

Once a service provider publishes a service, how can the provider know
which, whether, and how service requester will consume this service? A
service provider does NOT know whether the requester will only consume
this single service or will consume this service with many other
services. So how can you prescribe a process.owl file for your service
requesters when you develop a service? 

Just as you said, "The OWL-S files are intended to be consumed by OWL-S
client", how can service providers determine and control whether this
specific service can be used in whatever process model on the
client-side? For example, how can a rental car service provider know
whether or nor this service will be consumed by a service requester who
will just want to find a rental car, or who will also want to book an
airline ticket, or more want to reserve a hotel, and more want to get a
ticket packet for Disney World? 

The process.owl tries to describe or mimic the client-side activity for
a specific service requester. How a service provider can model or
imagine all possible client-side behaviors? Service
integration/aggregation is not the business of service provider. 

As for service requesters (i.e. application developers who integrate 1
or many services together to serve the end-users), is it necessary to
have such a process model? Then please see the following question:

Whom do you want to present such a "process model"? 

--1. To the service provider? The provider does not care about and
control how requesters integrate the service for whatever purpose. As
for provider in this case, if the preconditions are satisfied, it will
invoke the service and return the result to you otherwise fail. 
--2. Or do you want to present the process model to yourself - service
requester? It's strange as you know what you are doing (You may be
wondering why you show it to yourself).
--3. Or do you want to show the model to your client - the end-user?
It's ridiculous as I said before - the end-users (they may not be CS
professionals) are waiting for a result, not the process details of how
you hire subcontractors and how your subconstractors accomplish the task
for you. 

So, why they must be available on the web?

>>> Mark Burstein <burstein@bbn.com> 07/24/06 11:21 AM >>>
......

The process model must provide precise 
semantic correlates for all inputs and outputs that are possible in 
the WSDL messages that they correspond to, and must link these data 
to the corresponding preconditions and effects so that a service 
requester can mechanically determine whether and how it will provide 
the correct inputs and interpret the resulting outputs.

......
The OWL-S files are intended to be consumed by OWL-S client agents 
that are then able to call the described services. So they must be 
available on the web.

Received on Monday, 24 July 2006 18:11:57 UTC