RE: [Last Call] Web Services Description Requirements (fwd)

It is not very easy to read this document, since it is not always clear what
the implications of a particular requirement are (and less clear how they
interact - without some scenarios being provided the reader has to collect
the entire set in their head and then imagine the interactions...)

Some requirements are not really clear.

R021 The description language MUST describe the Messages accepted and
  generated by the Web Service. (From the Charter. Last revised 21 Feb 2002.)

Seems like a very obvious requirement, but the problem is the level of detail
to which it needs to describe a message. In doing things like screen scraping
(which seems an obvious application of a Web Service in the RDF world) it may
be important to specify the content at a granularity much finer than
MIME-type - and an RSS-like calendar scraper can happily work across several
MIME-types but requires certain properties of the documents it deal with. On
the other hand a scraper that uses some heuristics to guess at calendar-type
information and produce a representation of that can accept a wide range of
messages, and produces something that might be an SVG representation of some
iCal type information - again more detailed than a MIME type.

does

R123 The content model for human-readable comment capabilities MUST be open. (From
  RD. Last discussed 11 June 2002.)

mean that in fact it would be possible to add detailed RDF descriptions, as
well as an SVG diagram and some kind of textual explanation, to the
description of the service? Presumably if the spec gets it right the RDF
would be unnecessary, of course, since the actual information will already be
mappable to RDF.

does

R070 The WG specification(s) MUST allow providing a mapping from the description
  language to [RDF]. (From the Charter. Last revised 11 April, 2002.)

include the extensibility mechanism, so that any extensions can also be
mapped to RDF for automated discovery or providing further description? (It
seems so to me, but there is no real discussion in the requirements that
makes it clear whether this has been considered by the working group).

Just a couple of initial personal thoughts.

Chaals

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Dan Brickley wrote:

>
>
>Do please take a look at this. If anyone from the RDF Interest Group is
>available to do a detailed review, please get in touch with me.
>
>cheers,
>
>Dan
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Jonathan Marsh wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > This is the Last Call announcement from the W3C Web Services Description
>> > Working Group for review of the Web Services Description Requirements
>> > [1].
>> >
>> > Abstract:
>> >   This document describes the Web Services Description Working
>> >   Group's requirements for the Web Services Description specification.
>> >
>> > The Last Call review period ends on 31 December 2002. The Working Group
>> > does not intend to take this document further than Last Call, except to
>> > update this document in response to comments and requests from other
>> > Working Groups and the public.
>> >
>> > Comments on this document should be sent to
>> > public-ws-desc-comments@w3.org (archive [2]). It is inappropriate to
>> > send discussion emails to this address.  Issues arising from comments
>> > will appear on our issues list [3].
>> >
>> > The following Working Groups are especially invited to review the
>> > document:
>> >
>> >   Web Services Architecture
>> >   XML Protocol
>> >   XForms
>> >   RDF Interest Group
>> >   I18N
>> >   WAI
>> >
>> > Jonathan Marsh
>> > Chair, Web Services Description Working Group
>> >
>> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-desc-reqs/
>> > [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-desc-comments/
>> > [3]  http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/requirements/wsd-issues.xml
>

-- 
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Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 19:13:59 UTC