RE: Proposed Choreograph Working Group Charter

Here is an excerpt from BPSS Sec. 6.5 giving some idea of what that
particular spec means by Business Transaction Semantics:

"The ebXML Business Transaction semantics allows you to specify electronic
commerce transactions that provide

·  Interaction Predictability, i.e. have clear roles, clear transaction
scope,
clear time bounds, clear business information semantics, clear
determination of success or failure.
·  Ability to create Legally Binding Contracts, i.e. the ability to specify
that
Business Transactions may be agreed to bind the parties.
·  Nonrepudiation, i.e. may specify the keeping of artifacts to aid in legal
enforceability.
·  Authorization Security, i.e. may be specified to require athorization of
parties performing roles.
·  Document Security, i.e. may be specified to be authorized, authenticated,
confidential, tamperproof.
·  Reliability, i.e. the ability to specify reliable delivery of Business
Documents and signals.
·  Run time Business Transaction Semantics, i.e. the rules and
configuration parameters required for Business Service Interface software
to predictably and deterministically execute ebXML Business
Transactions."


Ugo

-----Original Message-----
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) [mailto:RogerCutler@ChevronTexaco.com]
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 1:59 PM
To: 'Francis McCabe'; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Proposed Choreograph Working Group Charter



I am not saying that agreements about semantics are not important, I'm
saying that I don't know whether making them is in the scope of the W3C.
Perhaps the issue of HOW the agreements are made, but not the agreements
themselves.

I think that there may be a disconnect here about what we are talking about.
I may well have misunderstood what people meant by "business semantics" --
and I may just be muddying the waters here.  Let me give an example:  I
don't think that the format of an invoice is in scope for W3C.  Nor is the
information necessary to "open an account" (e.g. Person's name, address,
etc).  However the language, or protocol or whatever you call it, by which
that format is defined is in scope.

I am not quite sure what is meant by "business semantics" when it comes up
in reference to choreography, but I am guessing that it means something like
the PIP's that are defined in RosettaNet.  If that is more or less correct,
I would think that some aspects might be in scope and others out, and it
makes sense to me to think a bit about the issue.

-----Original Message-----
From: Francis McCabe [mailto:fgm@fla.fujitsu.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 3:48 PM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Proposed Choreograph Working Group Charter



I cannot help thinking that if the group seriously considers being able 
to do business without semantics a positive rather than negative 
feature of today then there is some education necessary. If you are 
Ford, or Shell, it may be that you are able to bully your suppliers 
into a single accepted standard for the meanings of terms; however, 
even there there is a semantics -- it may not be written down, it may 
not be negotiable, and if you are not Ford etc. you may not have a say 
in it (and there get a chance to influence it) but hey you STILL have a 
semantics.

The difference between a written down semantics and a 
back-of-the-envelope semantics is not that there is no semantic 
attachment to verbs such as "open_this_account"; its simply that the 
meaning is opaque and inherently fragile. (If you write both the 
customer and supplier `agent' then this may not matter very much; but 
if I write the customer agent and you write the supplier agent, then we 
begin to get into trouble fast.)

Frank

On Monday, September 9, 2002, at 01:36  PM, Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) 
wrote:

>
> It's not clear to me that "business semantics" is even in the scope of
> the
> W3C.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 2:45 PM
> To: 'w3c-ws-arch@w3.org'
> Subject: RE: Proposed Choreograph Working Group Charter
>
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ugo Corda [mailto:UCorda@seebeyond.com]
>> Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 2:34 PM
>> To: 'w3c-ws-arch@w3.org'
>> Subject: RE: Proposed Choreograph Working Group Charter
>>
>>
>>
>> Yet another comment on the Charter:
>>
>> I am wondering whether the Charter should say something about 
>> addressing business semantics.
>
> My personal opinion [speaking as a member not a co-chair] is that this 
> Charter will have a better reception if we constrain it to  a subset 
> of "choreography" -- small enough to have existing practice to learn 
> from and so that a new spec can be written quickly, but large enough 
> provide for technology implementing the spec to have a real benefit.
>
> So, I'd say "no" -- let's try to focus on technology that works across 
> different business semantics (and even architectural styles).
>
>> while BPSS addresses business semantics most
>> of the other specs don't (that being considered a drawback of those 
>> other specs).
>
> It may be a drawback for those other specs in terms of functionality,
> but as
> a practical matter I doubt if very many people in the W3C or the member
> companies who might sign up for a Choreography WG believe that 
> "business
> semantics" is something ripe for standardization.
>
>

Received on Monday, 9 September 2002 17:12:11 UTC