Re: WSDL Debate Continued..

Hi David,

I think your two points were pretty much embodied in the recent WS
Activity proposal in W3C - creating the SA-WSDL working group for point
one and repurposing the SWS-IG for point two. Or do you think that
something is missing? 8-)

It's good to see a standards body do what people actually want. 8-)

Jacek

On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 16:42 -0800, David Martin wrote:
> Bijan Parsia wrote:
> 
> > Small point: There is no WSDL debate in any meaningful sense. We've been 
> > trolled (as Drew's post makes evident). Sorry for making it seem otherwise.
> > 
> > Frankly, just the nature of the W3C makes it nigh impossible to 
> > seriously depart from WSDL without an overwhelming rationale obviously 
> > convincing to all. I'm hard pressed to imagine what that could even been.
> > 
> > Given that *three* recent WS submissions (transfer, eventing, and 
> > enumeration) all build/rely on WSDL (and Addressing, which is connected 
> > to WSDL), suggests that, at least at the moment, enhancing WSDL is the 
> > way to enrich WS descriptions. So that's how we'll go.
> > 
> > (Where are the SWS-* specs? Let's start with preconditions and 
> > effects...my personal favorite. Isn't that hard! Or non-functional 
> > properties. Dublin core anyone? Again easy. We don't need a working 
> > group to make a proposal! Anyone interested? (Also, don't focus on the 
> > RDF mapping...focus on the normal WSDL (*provide* an extended mapping, 
> > natch).)
> > 
> > (This is one reason I don't think WSDL-S gets us much. We don't need 
> > *hooks* we need substantive content. WSDL is hooky enough.)
> 
> I agree that a set of new hooks (as exemplified by WSDL-S) probably 
> won't get us very far - not by itself, that is.  Of course the WSDL-S 
> vision allows the hooks to point to anything (OWL-S, UML, WSMO, ...), 
> which could be useful, but I think the community is also going to want 
> some standardization regarding what's pointed to (and the implications 
> of the pointing) before it gets really useful.
> 
> One very natural (and W3C-oriented) way to go, seems to me, would be a 
> simple 2-step approach:
> 
> (1) Go ahead and standardize something like WSDL-S (as envisioned in the 
> sa-ws charter: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/sa-ws-charter).
> 
> (2) Get the SWS folks together with interested WS stakeholders in 
> another working group to spell out how to specify, in a SemWeb-based 
> manner, the low-hanging fruit that's at the intersection of most of the 
> SWS proposals.
> 
> In my mind, what you mentioned above - preconditions, effects, 
> non-functional properties - is a large part of this low-hanging fruit. 
> Another piece is the ability to use a SemWeb language to specify the 
> types of inputs and outputs (something which, in principle at least, you 
> can already do in WSDL).  Another likely piece is the ability to locate 
> services within a class hierarchy, around which your non-functional 
> properties would be organized, and extended into specific domains.
> 
> Of course, once you've done (2), then it's not that important whether 
> the resulting specs are located directly within a WSDL document or are 
> pointed to, in some external location, by the WSDL-S annotations (as 
> several people have observed).
> 
> This second step has been discussed in various conversations among the 
> SWS camps, and I (for one) have the sense that it is pretty readily 
> doable.  In fact, Rick Hull proposed more-or-less these 2 steps at the 
> W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services.  Unfortunately 
> at that point there wasn't adequate time left for discussion but I think 
> many of the SWS folks, at least, were in sympathy with the idea.
> 
> - David
>

Received on Monday, 20 March 2006 12:51:11 UTC