Re: What protocols are in scope?

On Nov 11, 2003, at 10:12 AM, Mark Baker wrote:

> (subject changed; it's kinda creepy having your name in it 8-)

Agreed. Sorry for any perceived ad hominem....

> On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 09:42:42AM -0500, Geoff Arnold wrote:
>> It is my fervent hope that if SWS-IG ever dives down to the level
>> of message transport protocols the Great Referee In The Sky will
>> blow a whistle (or throw a flag, or whatever image you prefer)
>> and declare "out of scope, ten yard penalty"!
>
> Agreed.  I also have no interest in discussing transport protocols.
>
> Application interfaces, on the other hand, are presumably in scope.
> So we can have discussions about whether FIPA's INFORM and REQUEST
> operations are suitable/sufficient, right?  If so, then I claim that
> discussions about GET and POST are also in scope.
>

Well, the FIPA messaging model is thoroughly asynchronous. Even a 
REQUEST
is merely a proposal that the recipient should update its short-term 
goals
(its "intentions") to include the intent to inform the initiator about
something (the "something" being related to the content of the request).
The response to the request is typically encoded as an INFORM (or 
perhaps
a series of INFORMs).

So to a first order all FIPA style messages would be POSTs. They are
idempotent one-way messages, possibly one-many. It would certainly
be unwise to construct a hard and fast mapping between the primitive
speech acts of FIPA style agents and particular messaging primitives.

Having said all that, there is clearly some performance benefit to be 
gained
from piggy-backing a response within a single message-level transaction.
I'm not sure how best one would accomodate this, in part because of the
broken layering in SOAP/HTTP. However, that's properly the concern of
different W3C groups. Whatever efficient mechanisms are exposed for
one-way messaging can be exploited by BDI-style agents.

Just to get a little thread convergence here, there are clearly
interests of common concern between the OWL-S process group, the
choreography WG, and multi-agent "interaction patterns". If any of
them get too deeply entwined in lower-level messaging issues, it's going
to complicate any synthesis......

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 10:49:33 UTC