Re: A Priori Information (Was Snapshot of Web Services Glossary )

Mike,

I read "distributed extensibility" as something different from discovery.
I think it means services can extend their function without breaking
clients, and also without the designers of the services and the designers
of the clients sitting down ahead of the changes and hammering out
the new design.  I think that "coordination by designers ahead of time" is
what the "a priori" language is really about (my hunch).  But I'm also
unclear as to who the "third party" is.  Maybe some official mediation
body or clearinghouse for changes.  Anyway, I'm sure this is about more
than just the discovery of services.

Walden

----- Original Message -----
From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
To: <www-ws-arch@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: RE: A Priori Information (Was Snapshot of Web Services Glossary )


>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: David Orchard [mailto:dorchard@bea.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 12:59 AM
> > To: 'Mahan Michael (NRC/Boston)'; 'ext Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)';
> > 'Assaf Arkin'; 'Hugo Haas'
> > Cc: 'David Booth'; www-ws-arch@w3.org; 'Mark Baker'
> > Subject: RE: A Priori Information (Was Snapshot of Web
> > Services Glossary
> > )
> >
>
> > My guess is that any discussion around a priori has to focus on what
> > knowledge classifies as a priori, and what doesn't.
>
> I have the same issue.  Here's what the charter says:
>
> "The framework proposed must support the kind of extensibility actually
seen
> on the Web: disparity of document formats and protocols used to
communicate,
> mixing of XML vocabularies using XML namespaces, development of solutions
in
> a distributed environment without a central authority, etc. In particular,
> it must support distributed extensibility, without third party agreement,
> where the communicating parties do not have a priori knowledge of each
> other."
>
> At charter/requirements time, I thought this was basically talking about
> discovery, e.g. with Google and/or UDDI. Given a URI (as in the case of
> Google and a RESTful read-only web service, along with some convention
such
> as RDDL for getting the schema/semantics associated with a URI) or a
service
> registry that would supply this type of information in a more
> SOAP/WSDL-friendly way, a WS consumer could find and invoke a service
> without some specific agreement with the supplier.  ("Third party" seems a
> bit vague, but I interpret that to mean machine-machine discovery without
> getting humans involved for each  relationship.)
>
> I don't think we should spend too much time deconstructing this as a
> hard-and-fast requirement.  Clearly the W3C chartered this working group
to
> analyze the architecture of web services as they existed and do what we
> could to leverage the Web and reconcile WS practice with Web practice.  I
> think we've made some good progress along those lines.  We should make
sure
> that we allow what people do with the hypertext web (e.g. GET a schema,
WSDL
> file, RDF network, or whatever) but not insist on this type of thing
because
> it simply hasn't been proven to work for machine-machine communications
> without getting those nasty humans involved.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 10:31:34 UTC