Relationship to OASIS standards

Hi.

I am new to this list, therefore I am going to quickly introduce myself: my
name is Johannes Echterhoff and I am involved in standardization activities
of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC - http://www.opengeospatial.org).

Recently, there was quite a discussion in an OGC working group on how to
create standards that support both REST(ful) and WS-* (based upon standards
from W3C and OASIS) style web services. A lot of these discussions revolve
around the resources we need to model and how to do that in both
architectural styles. For the WS-* style, this brought me to the WS-Resource
specifications from OASIS. In addition, we want to integrate
publish/subscribe functionality in some of our web services. This brought me
to WS-Notification. I favoured the OASIS specifications because they reached
the final specification status, while for example WS-Eventing at the time
was "only" a W3C submission.

Now that I learnt of the activities of your working group, I have some
questions that I hope you can answer:

How are the activities of this W3C working group, especially the resulting
documents / standards related to the work done by OASIS? For example,
WS-Eventing appears to provide a subset of the functionality given by
WS-Notification.
Some time ago I read about a common approach to eventing in web service
environments, titled WS-EventNotification. I thought this was a great idea,
having a basic set of functionality which would support basic pub/sub and
optional extensions which provided higher functionality, like topic based
subscriptions or brokering. Unfortunately, according to
http://travisspencer.com/blog/2008/11/effort-to-converge-ws-eventing.html
the efforts to harmonize WS-Eventing and WS-Notification and create a
single, common standard have ceased. Please comment if this is true and if
so why the common approach has been abandoned.

There seems to be functional overlap of WS-(Resource)Transfer with the
WS-ResourceProperties specification from OASIS. The current working drafts
from your group look like they are more compatible with the http interface
(get, put, delete etc.), so the functionality implemented by the proposed
operations look like they could be more easily ported to a REST(ful) style
web service - is this the intention? 

[As for WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Enumeration I do not know of an OASIS
equivalent (have heard about WS-MetadataExchange before and found it quite
useful), but if there is one, please let me know.]


For my work at the OGC, I need guidance which approach (that from W3C or
OASIS) to use and promote. It would help a lot if there was a public
statement to what extent these apparently competing standards differ or
share the same functionality. If possible, guidance why one should use one
approach over the other would be highly appreciated - something like best
practices for various use cases. Right now the only arguments pro/contra an
approach for me are its current specification status
(submission/recommendation/draft/etc.), the functionality required/provided
and the available toolbase.

The thing is that for my OGC related standardization work I need to decide
which WS-* standards to use and which not to use. I would not like to end up
with a W3C and an OASIS architectural style for the implementation
specification of my geospatial web service, in addition to the REST(ful)
style. 

You see that I am a bit confused with the (apparently emerging) functional
overlap of W3C and OASIS specifications. I hope you can help to clarify the
current situation (on managing resources and eventing/notification in web
services).

Best regards,
Johannes Echterhoff

Received on Monday, 6 April 2009 11:49:13 UTC