- From: Shi, Xuan <xshi@GEO.WVU.edu>
- Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:24:55 -0500
- To: "'Drew McDermott '" <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>, "'public-sws-ig@w3.org '" <public-sws-ig@w3.org>
Dear Dr. McDermott, What and how machine can do is based on what and how human designs the procedure pre-defined for machine. Beyond the pre-defined scope, machine cannot do anything. Like SW problem discussed in McCool's paper, machine cannot process any exception beyond pre-defined logical inferential rules. That's the same to SWS. So, if a human can compose something, machine can do that based on human design. Not vice versa. What I emphasized is how to enable human beings in the general community to understand the composition process, not programmers and AI professionals as yourself. WSDL/SOAP are just for programmers and machines. That's a problem and you should not ignore it. You cannot just imagine you and machine can do something and that's enough, since your stress on machines obviously aggravate the digital divide crisis. If we can find simple and easy ways to do the same thing to replace the complex mechanism, it is your responsibility as a scientist to share such research to the public and community, but not on the contrary, to continue to build more complex systems to do the same simple and easy things for the human beings. In http://www.mapwv.com/basemap/viewer.htm, we can integrate the maps offered by USGS and Microsoft into this West Virginia node of National Map. Whenever you nevigate on the map, machine can automatically "compose" a new integrated map. How machine can do this automatically? Because I, human being, know how to compose it first. Best wishes, Xuan -----Original Message----- From: Drew McDermott To: public-sws-ig@w3.org Sent: 3/16/06 11:17 PM Subject: RE: Semantics of WSDL vs. semantics of service > [Shi, Xuan] > ... I know I said something different from the others. Such as what is > service composition? My definition is different from the so-called > "standard" meaning, but I think it is more realistic and understandable for > all users who are not programmers and AI professionals to consume Web > services. This admission is simply astonishing. I pointed this discrepancy out to Xuan months ago in private correspondence. The SW community disagrees about many aspects of the "service composition problem," but everyone agrees it involves computers doing some sort of combination of solutions of small web-service problems in order to solve bigger problems. Because the English word "compose" is ambiguous, and because Xuan came into this area as an outsider, he originally thought it meant human composition of web-service requests (as one would compose an SQL request, for instance). An honest misunderstanding. But it is not an acceptable response to such a revelation to continue to use the semi-standard term in one's nonstandard way. To do so is to guarantee that any discussion using the term will be meaningless, chaotic, and ultimately acrimonious. (The more so if there are _other_ terms that are being used in nonstandard ways; who knows?) I don't see why anyone would pursue this any further. -- -- Drew McDermott Yale University Computer Science Department
Received on Friday, 17 March 2006 15:25:12 UTC