Re: Hypermedia workflow

On Saturday, December 21, 2002, at 12:58  PM, bhaugen wrote:
> Wow!  If that will make the counterexamples come out of the woodwork,
> I'll say it: there are no true multiparty business interactions in
> actual
> use! </ducking...>

Well, I don't know about "in use", but the canonical multiparty example
is an auction, such as ContractNet. This only reduces to pairwise
interactions if you trust the auctioneer to inform all parties,
impartially and in a timely fashion, of every bid. In addition to
being an interesting trust and non-repudiation issue (and getting into
reliable messaging as well!) such a pairwise solution really doesn't 
scale
very well. A multicast approach models the human notion of
auction much better, and this pushes it into the multiparty
zone.....

I'd be interested in comments from folks who've been involved
in auction and other negotiation work; David Levine of IBM,
for instance.

Geoff

Received on Monday, 23 December 2002 09:22:10 UTC