Re: Options we have with respect to the draft charters (i.e., RE: [fwd] Draft charters for work on Semantics for WS)

Bijan, 

That's a good point. In our discussions with customers, we have noticed 
that they tend to be apprehensive about anyone meddling with their WSDLs 
even if it is to add semantic annotations and not change any service 
interfaces. But I think this hestitation stems from the fact that in-band 
annotation of WSDLs is not considered a standard. People would be more 
willing to accept such an approach if it were a standard. Not requiring 
modifications to WSDL is not necessarily preferable if it adds to 
maintaining information about a service in multiple places. In any case, I 
can see the point from both sides. I agree that the issue of in-band & 
out-of-band annotations of WSDL should certainly be considered in the WG.

Regards
Rama Akkiraju

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
e-mail: akkiraju@us.ibm.com




Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu> 
Sent by: public-sws-ig-request@w3.org
11/19/2005 12:53 PM

To
David Martin <martin@AI.SRI.COM>
cc
public-sws-ig <public-sws-ig@w3.org>, Amit Sheth <amit@cs.uga.edu>
Subject
Re: Options we have with respect to the draft charters (i.e., RE:  [fwd] 
Draft charters for work on Semantics for WS)







A small technical point which may have been brought up before. (I can't 
really speak to the politics since 1) I've been traveling for the past 
two weeks and haven't caught up and, alas, am unlikely to be able to 
and 2) as y'all know from the workshop I'm a bit resistant to moving to 
a working group in this area, though this one seems somewhat scoped.) 
One difference between the WSDL-S and OWL-S, as I understand it, 
approaches that might now be mooted by WSDL 2.0 but is perhaps worth 
raising is that  OWL-S descriptions are, in general practice, out of 
band annotations on the WSDL document. That is, the OWL-S document 
points to the WSDL document and doesn't *require* any modifications to 
the WSDL. This allows for multiple variant descriptions, perhaps from 
third parties.

Now some of this may be mooted by the RDF mapping...but probably not :) 
In any case, there are clear advantages to the "out of band" annotation 
approach, especially for adoption, so I would like to see such support 
explored by a working group.

(In other words, it's not just integrating with WSDL the spec via 
extension but integrating with deployed WSDL documents that is an 
issue.)

Cheers,
Bijan.