Roles of Humans

I would like to suggest the following verbiage to add to 1.5.5, the Role
of Humans.  The motivation is to recognize explicitly a major current
usage of Web services supported and actively marketed by a number of W3C
member companies.  There is also an intention to dovetail with verbiage
elsewhere about actions and the roles of individuals, as discussed in
the posting I sent earlier, and to some extent, again, to provide some
framework for growth in semantic technology (although in this case the
connection is less direct).

3. Humans may directly initiate the invocation of a Web service, for
example as an automated function of a spreadsheet that is invoked when a
human types an entry into a cell, or the invocation of a Web service may
be initiated in an automated fashion, for example as might happen in a
purchasing work flow handled by a backoffice system in response to the
decision of an engineer to purchase a centrifugal pump.  Invocations of
Web services always result, at least indirectly, from something that a
human being has done, but that causative action may be removed by many
layers of automation, and considerable time, from the actual invocation
of the Web service.

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2003 04:00:53 UTC