Can we break Rule One? (was RE: Proposed Draft Charter for Choreo graphy WG)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bhaugen [mailto:linkage@interaccess.com]
> Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2002 3:38 PM
> To: Burdett, David; www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Cc: Probert, Sue
> Subject: Re: Proposed Draft Charter for Choreography WG
> 
> 

> As the ISO Open-EDI group discovered (and called Rule One),
> you're not just exchanging data, you're making legal commitments.
> For example, Purchase Orders are legal contracts.
> 
> I expect choreographies (or whatever rules of engagement evolve
> for electronic business collaborations) to become legal contracts.

Sigh.  I hope I'm not being naive to think that the business/legal/semantic
aspects of web services transactions/choreography can be decoupled from the
technological aspects of describing sequences of web services and
coordinating their state.  We discussed this somewhat during the
requirements phase under "non-repudiation."  That has a business/legal
meaning that the web services architecture probably won't say much about,
but some infrastructure is needed to collect the data about who did what
when, and how we know that reliably, in order to allow business-level
non-repudiation.  I think we can aspire to something like that in the area
of choreography: 

> Lawyers will be involved.  Getting agreement among three
> parties is more than half again as difficult as getting agreement
> among two parties.  Plus, whenever the "choregraphy" changes,
> all parties must agree again, even if the part that changed
> did not affect them.

Let's not fall into the trap that some fall into of assuming that technical
solutions can make intractable human problems go away.  On the other hand, I
think we can factor out the technical issues that a WS reference
architecture can address so at least they aren't all tangled up with the
legal, business, and semantic issues.

Does this seem like a use way to think about choreography and what we can
productively say about it?

Received on Saturday, 9 November 2002 19:30:27 UTC