RE: Automating the restaurant example

Mark

Your example involves a human, you, who gives permission to another human (I
think) who is your agent who does the search. Even if the agent isn't a
human and is software, then how did the agent software get, without any
human intervention:
1. The intelligence to carry out and analyze the results of the search
2. Understanding the semantics the schemas for the menu and order
3. Knowlesge that, after the receiving the menu, it could send an order.

I don't think your example qulaifies as "no human involved".

The point I'm trying to make, is that if these things aren't standardized,
then you need to re-program them **every single time**. This won't happen as
it is too expensieve.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2002 12:38 PM
To: Burdett, David
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Automating the restaurant example


(time for a subject line change ...)

Hi David,

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 11:25:13AM -0700, Burdett, David wrote:
> I really would like to see explained an example of how to do peer-to-peer,
> i.e. without a human being involved, in a way that does not need to
> standardize messages. I also challenged Paul to do this in the email at
[3].

Ok, let's automate the restaurant example.  Say there isn't a waiter,
just a service out there on the 'net, identified by a URI;

http://restaurant.example.org

My agent, to which I've given permission to act on my behalf to order
me a hamburger, finds this URI through some means (UDDI, Google, etc..),
invokes GET, and sees some XML that describes a menu of what's available
for order, including a declaration that all orders should be submitted
to http://restaurant.example.org/order/.  So my agent produces an order
document with a hamburger, and credit card info, then POSTs it to that
latter URI.

Here, all that needs standardizing (that isn't already standardized) is
an XML schema for a menu, and an XML schema for an order.  I'm also not
considering RDF, which could simplify that somewhat, so that agreement
on what constitutes an order and a menu doesn't have to be all or
nothing (ala partial understanding[1]).

 [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-webarch-extlang-19980210

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.
http://www.markbaker.ca             http://www.idokorro.com