Actions and Semantics

I would like to propose the following verbiage for 2.3.2.1 - Action.
The motivations are to harmonize with the excellent discussion in
2.3.4.4.3 and to exhibit, or develop, the potential of this architecture
to enable growth associated with semantic technology.

Definition: An action, for the purposes of this architecture, is
something that happens as the result, whether direct or indirect, of an
experession of free will by a human being.

Discussion:  An earthquake is not, in this architecture, considered an
action even though it obviously exerts force and achieves results.  An
earthquake, however, can trigger actions, possibly automated, that were
engineered by human beings.

In much of this architecture the actions considered explicitly involve
sending or receiving messages.  There is, however, no intention to
consider other actions performed by the agents involved with the
services to be out of scope.  After all, if one invokes the
"PurchaseBook" service the intended result is probably not just to get a
purchase order acknowledgement message but also to have a book show up
in the mail.  The actions performed by service agents that are the
raison d'etre of the Web services are currently expressed primarily in
the semantic description of the service, generally in natural language,
but advances in semantic technology may move, over time, aspects of this
function into machine readable form.  This is a development that this
architecture intends to enable, not constrain.

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2003 03:50:18 UTC