RE: On why services may not have URIs

Walden, 

You claim:
> An agent is not a service.  

How can you support that? Is that said in our document or a cited reference?
Last I read, the relationship between agent->service->resource was still
undefined.

DaveH

-----Original Message-----
From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 3:25 PM
To: Francis McCabe; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: On why services may not have URIs



> However, in the case of a composite service, there may not be a single 
> transport end-point associated with it. Consider the 
> Request/Subscribe/Publish model in which separate entities manage the 
> subscriptions from the publications. It is all one service (from the 
> POV of a requestor) but not from the provider's POV.

Maybe the requestor's view is all that matters.

> 
> In addition, a given agent may be offering several services; and 
> requiring that the agent map those into different transport end-points 
> imposes an architectural constraint on the implementation that doesn't 
> necessarily reflect the customers requirements.

An agent is not a service.  The requirement is that each service be
bound to an identifier.  How is that broken?

> 
> The other possible answer is that the service URI points to the 
> description of the service. However, we have always said that service 
> descriptions MAY be formally expressed, not MUST be. I.e., there may 
> not be anything to GET at the end of the service URI.
> 
> In effect, we can say nothing about the resource identified by the URI. 
> This is reminiscent of the XML namespace URI.
> 
> Comments?
> 
>

Received on Monday, 21 April 2003 19:17:00 UTC