issue: embedding semantic descriptions?

Hi, to bring one possibly contentious issue in the open, I suggest that
we consider whether we want to allow embedded semantic descriptions or
whether we want to restrict SAWSDL to just URI references to external
things?

Currently we have modelReference and schemaMapping that contain a URI. 
I see a number of additional options that are not necessarily exclusive:

1) we can document that these URIs may point to elements within the WSDL
file with a particular ID, so we could for example put a model or an
XSLT stylesheet inside wsdl:description, put an xml:id on it and then
refer to that ID with a fragment identifier in a URI.

<wsdl:description ...>
  <xsl:stylesheet xml:id="transformation">
    ...
  </xsl:stylesheet>
  <wsdl:types>
    <xs:schema ...>
      <xs:element sawsdl:schemaMapping="#transformation" .../>
    </xs:schema>
  </wsdl:types>
  ...
</wsdl:description>


2) we can provide a container element akin to wsdl:types that would
contain semantic descriptions defining some URIs that could then be the
values of modelReference

<wsdl:description ...>
  <sawsdl:models>
    <wsml:wsml ...>
      <wsml:concept id="http://example.com/foobar"/>
    </wsml:wsml>
  </sawsdl:models>
  <wsdl:types>
    <xs:schema ...>
      <xs:element sawsdl:modelReference="http://example.com/foobar" .../>
    </xs:schema>
  </wsdl:types>
  ...
</wsdl:description>


3) we can provide an element equivalent to the modelReference attribute
(and similarly for the schemaMapping attribute) that would contain the
actual semantic description (or transformation) without the necessity of
giving it any URI.

<wsdl:description ...>
  <wsdl:types>
    <xs:schema ...>
      <xs:element ...>
        <sawsdl:schemaMapping>
          <xsl:stylesheet>
            ...
          </xsl:stylesheet>
        </sawsdl:schemaMapping>
      </xs:element>
    </xs:schema>
  </wsdl:types>
  ...
</wsdl:description>


Note that option 1 requires no new elements or attributes from us, it
would be just documentation for recognized practice. However, option 2
could be more compatible with the WSDL 2 component view of the
documents. Finally, option 3 is really here just for consideration in
case somebody else is interested in pursuing it.

What do you think?

Jacek Kopecký

-- 
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
University of Innsbruck, Austria
Phone: +43 512 5076481
Org:   http://www.deri.org/
Blog:  http://jacek.cz/blog/

Received on Monday, 17 April 2006 16:03:45 UTC