RE: granularity/definition of a "service"

Thanks Ian.  These are interesting examples, but neither seems to
represent a stand-alone receive service.

Data-gathering for security is a service that is invoked by a group of
citizens.  Its input is a representation of some behavior of individuals
and its output is maybe a report on vulnerabilities or oddities.  An
individual does not invoke it and it certainly does more than just
receive data.

Joe Hacker might invoke a keystroke-logging service on my computer.  It
would record and return a log of my keystrokes, so it is more than a
receive from his standpoint.  From my standpoint, if I were unaware of
it, then it would not qualify as a service to me.  If I were aware of
it, it would be a composite of two services:  receive my keystrokes and
communicate them to Joe Hacker.

However, your examples have inspired me to come up with my own
counterexamples.  Here is an example that might qualify as a
receive-only service (thus countering my own claim that it would never
be useful).  Imagine that I am writing a program to send and receive
email and I want to test the sending part.  I don't want to annoy my
friends with test messages.  A service that would simply receive an
email and ignore it would be useful to me.

Second, if my software agents ever progress to where they become
religious, then a prayer service might also be considered receive-only
and useful to them.

Cheers,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Dickinson [mailto:ian.dickinson@hp.com] 
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 8:21 AM
To: Huhns, Michael
Cc: public-sws-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: granularity/definition of a "service"

Huhns, Michael wrote:
> A "service" that only receives is equivalent to a write-only memory.
I
> have never found that to be a useful service and would like to hear
> about the situation you are imagining where it would be a coherent
> stand-alone functionality.
You could argue that, for the average citizen, data-gathering by state 
security services is a write-only memory.  Likewise, any situation where

information is captured that is intended to be read only be 
third-parties, not by the capturer him/her self.  Trojan-horse keystroke

loggers would be an example (not that you'd choose to invoke such a 
service from a UDDI registry :-)

Cheers,
Ian

Ian Dickinson
HPLabs, Bristol, UK

Received on Sunday, 19 September 2004 15:56:21 UTC