Re: [OWL-S]: proposal to collapse ProcessModel and Process

>> If the Profile is a black-box view of a service, and the process a 
>> glass-box view, what is the purpose of the SimpleProcess class?
>
> The perennial question.
>
>> Is it really needed? Isn't the purpose of SimpleProcess to provide a 
>> "black-box" view of a CompositeProcess?
>
> Actually, it can provide an abstraction over a set of processes, be 
> they atomic or composite.
>
> SimpleProcesses can be composed with other processes (profiles can't). 
> OTOH, for many purposes SimpleProcesses really want some of the stuff 
> that goes in a profile (e.g., templates where you want a cost function 
> associated with the "holes"). You can work around this, I suppose, by 
> associating SimpleProcesses with Profiles. Ick. Workable, but not the 
> happiest.

Bugger - he beat me to this :)
Simple Processes can be thought of as abstractions for processes, that 
can then be realisedBy an atomic process or expanded by a composite.  
Of course, a model may not actually have these relationships, in which 
case one possiblity, as Bijan noted) is to then drive discovery from 
these simple processes, thus achieving dynamic binding of new services.

The challenge here is to infer profiles that can drive discovery from 
simple processes.  This is an unresolved problem, partially because of 
the related nonfunctional parameters that are only ever specified in 
the profile.  If these apply to all processes in the process model, 
then one could associate them to the simple process (in question); 
however, if the nonfunctional parameters were process specific 
(something we don't represent right now), then should they be 
considered...???

Also (to throw this into the mix) - a simple process may relate to a 
task or action that the requester could  perform, and thus represent 
necessary requester-specific stages in a workflow.

	Terry

_______________________________________________________________________
Terry R. Payne, PhD.		| http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~trp/index.html
AgentLink III Co-coordinator	| AgentLink III - http://www.agentlink.org
University of Southampton	| Voice: +44(0)23 8059 8343 [Fax: 8059 2865]
Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK | Email: terry@acm.org / trp@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2004 16:45:12 UTC