Re: Choreography and the Semantic Web

+1

Christopher Ferris
Architect, Emerging e-business Industry Architecture
email: chrisfer@us.ibm.com
phone: +1 508 234 3624

www-ws-arch-request@w3.org wrote on 08/12/2002 12:22:57 PM:

> 
> 
> On Saturday, August 10, 2002, at 07:40  PM, Champion, Mike wrote:
> >
> > Is there some modus vivendi possible here? ... along the lines of a 
WSA
> > framework that is rich to describe the *principles* of coordination,
> > conversations, reliability in a useful way that is abstract enough to 
be
> > implemented with either a stack of special purpose schemas and layers 
on 
> > top
> > of SOAP, or with specific ontologies expressed in a general purpose 
> > semantic
> > language?
> >
> 
> I believe that something like this is exactly what we are looking for -- 
a 
> framework that is supportive enough of smart automatic navigation will 
> also be supportive of all the myriad ways that humans want to interact 
as 
> well.
> 
> 
> 
> > In my humble, personal, not-speaking-from-the-chair opinion, this 
sounds
> > like an old, old story in the software industry: the "next big thing"
> > supposedly can't get off the ground because standards need to be put 
in
> > place, or tools need to be built, or the guardians of the old paradigm 

> > have
> > to die out or give up so that the new can flourish. (Sorry, I know SW 
> > people
> > hate being compared to AI people, but this argument is eerily similar 
to 
> > AI
> > advocacy circa 1985.)  The trouble is that the the really good ideas 
> > succeed
> > despite all this, most notably the World Wide Web. [See Clayton
> > Christensen's THE INNOVATORS DILEMMA for a bunch of other examples of
> > "disruptive" innovations in a wide variety of fields]. Web standards 
were
> > initially built in order to control the explosion of innovative ideas 
that
> > threatened the interoperability of the Web, they weren't needed to 
produce
> > widespread adoption.  Tools were created to meet the demand, they 
weren't
> > needed to create the demand for web pages, CGI scripts, etc.  And the 
old
> > guard might not have been the first to jump on the Web bandwagon, but 
they
> > didn't try to stop it either (I guess they ignored the bandwagon until 
it
> > was obvious that it was time to jump on, and they did so with a 
vengance)
> > .
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> > As I see it, the WSA has to rise above the alphabet soup of the 
various
> > proposed standards du jour, but we can't rise up into the clouds and 
> > expect
> > the semantic web technologies to sort it out someday Real Soon Now 
either.
> >  .
> > We have to make sense out of today's technology as it is applied to 
real
> > problems (as the WSCI, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction, etc. proposals 
try
> > to do), and we have to leave room for this to be subsumed by
> > RDS/DAML-S/OWL-based tools when/if they mature.
> >
> >
> 
> Again +1 for this one. As a relative W3C `outsider', I have been 
somewhat 
> dismayed (hey, I'm English,  I can use words like dismayed) by the 
fairly 
> flagrant ignorance of traditional software engineering principles.
> 
> Frank
>