RE: Hypermedia workflow

Right.  I was about to say the same thing.  I hesitate to say that there
are no true multiparty business interaction protocols in actual use --
if I were to do so no doubt the counterexamples would come out of the
woodwork.  But if there are any I sure don't think that there are very
many, and you can do an awful lot with pairwise interactions.  I have
not, for example, seen any usage cases proposed in the choreography
specs or these email threads that seem to require anything beyond
pairwise interactions.

Why make things more complicated than they need to be?  Or, perhaps, why
not start out with the simpler scenarios that currently get most of the
real work done?

-----Original Message-----
From: bhaugen [mailto:linkage@interaccess.com] 
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 6:19 AM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Hypermedia workflow



Assaf Arkin wrote:
> Some scenarios are defined by consortia and them get adopted by
businesses.
> For example RoessetaNet or supply chain management. In this case you
have a
> multi-party definition and each partner respects their role and don't
try to
> break it by having a more specific interaction that is different form
what
> every other partner (actual or possible) would expect.

RosettaNet is an interesting case:
the configurations are defined by the consortia,
but all the interactions and coordination
are strictly two-parties-at-a-time.

So far the same is true for all the supply chain
cofigurations I have worked on or seen.  For example,
Tony Fletcher and I designed some drop-ship
configurations that broke a 4-party scenario
into sets of 2-party interactions with all the
coordination being the internal responsibility
of the distributor.  Then we found that
Amazon uses almost exactly one of
our hypothetical configurarions.
(Except theirs is a little better...)

Received on Saturday, 21 December 2002 11:54:17 UTC