Separate concepts for "service" and "targetResource?" (was RE: /s ervice/@targetResource ?)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jacek Kopecky [mailto:jacek@systinet.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 10:03 AM
> To: WS-Description WG
> Subject: Re: /service/@targetResource ?
> 

> If yes, we're basically splitting the old service construct into a
> number of the new service constructs limited to one interface each,
> linked together by the value of the new attribute, right?

That's how I understand the joint discussions between the WSA and WSD WGs
last Wednesday.  The WSA group discussed this quite a bit, and did not come
to a strong conclusion.  

My own personal understanding is that we have to distinguish the description
of a service that is shared by the service requester and provider from the
reality of the service as deployed by the provider.  WSD can probably
abstract away all the messy details of the service provider resource behind
a URI -- all you really care is that it has identity, and you can compare
two service descriptions to see if they ultimately refer to the same
physical resource.  WSA has to hand more properties on the service provider
resource, such as whatever we are going to say about manageability, whatever
we can say about the semantics of the resource and the tasks it performs,
and the details of its interface to the Web services world.

I think we need to discuss terminology a bit.  "Resource" is not good
because it is too generic; a (deployed) web service clearly is a Resource in
the sense of the Web architecture document, but so is essentially everything
else that has identity.  "Target resource" is OK, or "ultimate target
resource" or  "service provider resource" are probably more descriptive (but
verbose).  "targetResource" is probably a good label for now. 
 
> 
> Jacek
> 
> On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 17:10, Arthur Ryman wrote:
> > In the discussion with the architecture group today, there seemed to
> > be confusion between a service and the resource is acts on. The
> > architecture group defines a Web service to have something 
> that has a
> > URI, but that URI is not the same as the resource that the 
> Web service
> > acts on.
> > 
> > For example, a bank might have a personal banking Web service. The
> > account Web service acts on the bank.
> > 
> > We can build a URI from the QName of the personal banking 
> Web service,
> > e.g. http://xml.fredsbank.com#service(PersonalBanking). The bank
> > itself might have the URI http://fredsbank.com.
> > 
> > We agreed to add an optional @resource attribute to <service>. I
> > suggest it would be clearer to rename that attribute to
> > @targetResource to make it clear that the service acts on that
> > resource as opposed to it being the URI of the Web service.
> > 
> > Arthur Ryman
>

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2003 11:05:40 UTC