Re: Goal for "a priori"

<HatOff>
Mark,

The phrase "without third party agreement" is a little
puzzling. What exactly does this mean in this context.

See [1] for a definition of "third party". How does a
"third party" become involved in extensibility? What/who is
this "third party"?

I could see "without prior agreement", but that too is a little
fuzzy. Sometimes, prior agreement is "a good thing(tm)" and
quite necessary (like, "you can't use this web service until
you've registered an account and agreed to the t's and c's").
I suppose that technically, this is orthogonal to the issue of
extensibility, but it points out the need to be careful and
explicit in our selection of words and phrases.

Most e-business works off of some manner of prior agreement
(a trading partner agreement which is typically a contract
or legal document). I suppose that technically, this isn't
an aspect that applies to extensibility, but it is still
something that applies in the context of certain services.

When we consider the web today, with a human sitting in
front of a browser, presented with a series of web forms,
they use grey matter, "common sense" and prior knowledge
(shared language) to fill out the forms before submitting
them. The user doesn't have to know 'a priori' what fields/values
the form will be requiring because they retrieve the representation
of the resource each time they use it and they can (usually)
figure out what to do based on the contents/context of the
retrieved representation (form).

An automated resource is a very different story though. Without
shared knowledge, understanding and language, it is quite
a difficult proposition to achieve the same degree of
functionality that we see on the web today when the consumer
is a human, with a rather sophisticated inference engine
at their disposal. Most software lacks this last critical
feature, so there is bound to be a need for *some* degree
of 'a priori' knowledge.

Cheers,

Chris-not-the-chair

[1] http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=third+party&r=3

</HatOff>

Mark Baker wrote:

> All,
> 
> I believe we need to find a goal for our charter directive that "In
> particular, it must support distributed extensibility, without third
> party agreement, where the communicating parties do not have a priori
> knowledge of each other." 
> 
> IMO, the closest goal we have that would cover this is D-AG0003, as
> it relates to extensibility, so I would ask Nilo to consider this
> as a suggestion to add it to his goal.
> 
> This is related to our issue #1;
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/arch/2/issues/wsa-issues.html#x1
> 
> MB
>

Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 23:34:06 UTC