RE: Redrafting section 2.1 - Intro to concepts section

I think that this is very good.  I particularly strongly agree with [1],
and I feel that this insight is a very important one.

-----Original Message-----
From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 1:42 PM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Redrafting section 2.1 - Intro to concepts section



Reviewing the minutes from Rennes to try to identify specific action
items to the editors, I found it easier to just try my hand at
redrafting these paragraphs rather than try to explain what we agreed.
Consider this a strawman [with obviously controversial parts marked
clearly].  We need to either find someone to "own" this section and
drive us toward consensus, or accept the strawman and let the editors
wordsmith.

=============================================================

The formal core of the architecture is this enumeration of the core
concepts and relationships that are common to most vendor-specific Web
service architecture visions and implied by Web services specifications.

[1]

Each concept is presented according to a common template consisting of
our relatively formal definition of the concept, an enumeration of the
relationships with other concepts, and a "natural language" discussion
of what this all means.  The concept definitions and relationships are
intended to be definitive and precise, but the descriptions are intended
to enhance general and informal understanding.  In general, the concepts
are expressed as nouns and the relationships expressed as verbs [2].


The ordering of the concepts in this section is alphabetical; this
should not be understood to imply any relative importance. For a more
focused viewpoint the reader is directed to the Stakeholder's
perspectives section which examines the architecture from the
perspective of key stakeholders of the architecture.

The reason for choosing an alphabetical ordering is that, inevitably,
there is a large amount of cross-referencing between the concepts. As a
result, it is very difficult, if not misleading, to choose a
non-alphabetic ordering that reflects some sense of priority between the
concepts. Furthermore, the `optimal ordering' depends very much on the
point of view of the reader. Hence, we devote the Stakeholders
perspectives section to a number of prioriterized readings of the
architecture.

================================================================

The next two paragraphs in 2.1 need to be reworked and probably put in
either the INTRODUCTION or the FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS section.  They talk
about "conformance", which is a very slippery concept when we're talking
about a reference architecture from a group that has no authority to
enforce it.  I'll send a separate message on that.


[1] The old draft talks about interoperability and implementations; my
sense of the discussions at Rennes is that we are only seeking to guide
specs rather than implementations.  Interop is both a spec-level rather
than architecture-level issue (for the most part!) and something that is
clearly in the domain of the WS-I.  I think our goal is to clarify the
vision not define a direct basis for interoperability. Based on a couple
of 1:1 discussions with TimBL, the sense in Rennes was "we will succeed
when we can define Web Service and show how the pieces (description,
messaging, choreography, etc. etc. etc.) fit together."

[2] I'm not sure we agreed on this, but it seemed like a good idea to
most of us in Rennes.

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2003 14:59:23 UTC