RE: Restructuring concepts and relations

Well, I see your point, Hugo, about using the word "legal" and I think I
understand the source of the concern.  We certainly don't want to
pretend that we are setting down any standards for what is legal or
engaging somehow in the practice of law.  Nor do we want to get a bunch
of lawyers involved in the WG, as happened on the Patent Policy WG.  On
the other hand, from a business perspective I REALLY hope that we can
find some sort of middle ground and keep these concepts around somehow.
These are core concerns for businesses.  For example, the concept of
what portions of the conceptual model can be owned, and that there is a
legal aspect to that ownership, is important at least to recognize.  If
a "service" and a related "agent" can have different ownership I think
that's really important to understand.  And I think that there are going
to be a bunch of other places where the connection to legal concepts is
important to recognize.

Maybe that suggests an approach we might take?  Something like, "legal
stuff attaches here -- we don't know what it is but we know where it is
relevant -- consult your friendly lawyer to expand this box".  

-----Original Message-----
From: Hugo Haas [mailto:hugo@w3.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 3:38 AM
To: Francis McCabe
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Restructuring concepts and relations



* Francis McCabe <fgm@fla.fujitsu.com> [2003-06-24 00:27-0500]
> Mike and I have been noodling a little on the overall bag of concepts
> and relationships.
> 
> Enclosed is a super-concept diagram (v. incomplete as yet) that
> highlights one possible breakdown of the architecture:
[..]
> The idea is that the WSA can be partitioned as a kind of
> system-of-systems. There is a fairly densely connected set of 
> dependencies between these areas but generally each can also be viewed

> in as independent systems.

This seems like a good way to have a good organization of the document
and clearer diagrams to me.

The work we started with concentrating on message-related concepts goes
in the direction of focusing on the MOA to start with.

One comment about your overview:

[..]
> The Security architecture is really a poor name. It is really
> attempting to capture policies, privacy (at a different level to that 
> in the MOA), legal accountability (**), etc. A better name would be
the 
> Institutional Architecture but that name may confuse a bunch of
people.

I have heard from different people, both inside and outside the WG,
concerns over the use of the term "legal".

We are addressing technical problems, and should limit ourselves to
identifying the real-world ownership of relevant systems and who they
are acting on behalf of, as pointed out in the definition of agent. I am
actually not sure that we need to represent both.  Therefore, I would
stay away from considering legal accountability as a core concept and
just have a hook to the real world in our architecture.

We should probably also rename "legal entity" into something like
"real-world entity", "owner" or "user". Note that I am not intending
here to start a debate about how to label what's currently called "legal
entity", and am happy to continue to see "legal entity" until we start
focusing on this part of the architecture.

Regards,

Hugo

-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2003 10:43:04 UTC