Defining coordination/orchestration/choreography/

Now that the W3C has acknolwedged submission of the WSCI "choreography"
interface spec, and the trade press reports that Microsoft, IBM, and BEA
will jointly announce on Monday BPEL4WS, a "business process execution
language for web services" along with WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination,
it's clear that this general area is going to get a lot of mindshare and
press attention.  One thing people will ask, and it would be good to have
answers handy, is what are the differences among:

coordination
orchestration
choreography
workflow
flow language
business process execution 
long-running transaction management
ACID transaction processing

Also, some terms may have a different meaning in this context than in other
contexts.   For example
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/09/020809hnwstrio.xml refers
to "non repudiation" as meaning "making sure that a transaction happens only
once and if a mistake occurs it is compensated for automatically."   That's
not consistent with the definition of "non repudiation" we've discussed in
the security context, Sigh.

I suggest that we keep these terms in mind as we read the new specs and
proposals, and to discuss the meaning(s) of these terms on this list so as
to inform our Glossary and any WG charters or liason activities we may
undertake.

So, anyone want to start things off with a definition of some of these terms
that is precise enough to distinguish among them, or to make a compelling
argument that some mean more or less the same thing and we should define
them as synonyms?

Received on Saturday, 10 August 2002 01:30:30 UTC