RE: Requester/provider agent/entity terminology

This is a great step forward in consistency for us. Maybe we can talk about this at the F2F because the more I read it (and maybe it's clearer now than it was) the more I want to avoid including the concepts of people and organizations.  If we were to deal with only a single kind of entity - the software kind - we would be simpler and perhaps more consistent still.

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Francis McCabe
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 11:56 AM
To: David Booth
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Requester/provider agent/entity terminology



The trouble with thing is that in normal English usage it refers to  
physical objects, and certainly not actions or abstract potential for  
action.

One of the ramifications of the word entity is one of cohesion and  
wholeness. In fact, again in normal English usage, entity is more  
abstract than person or organization; although entity is sometimes used  
to denote organizations.

I do not much like the RFC version of the resource definition. It  
sounds like it was thrown together without much thought.

However, I recognize that its slippery and probably not worth losing a  
whole lot of sleep over.

On Jan 21, 2004, at 5:42 PM, David Booth wrote:

> I believe I've finished making our terminology consistent in our WSA  
> document[1].  Informally:
>         provider agent -- the agent that realizes a Web service
>         requester agent -- the agent that interacts with a provider  
> agent
>         provider entity -- the person or org. owning the provider agent
>         requester entity -- the person or org. owning the requester  
> agent
>
>         service requester -- (ambiguous; to be avoided in this doc)
>         service provider -- (ambiguous; to be avoided in this doc)
>
> As a result, there were a MANY small changes I made along the way.   
> Most weren't worth noting, but a few I wanted to mention:
>
> Changed some occurrences of the word "entity" when it wasn't referring  
> to our defined term "requester entity" or "provider entity".
>
> Tweeked the concept description of "service" accordingly.
>
> Deleted "A resource is an entity" from the concepts definition of  
> "resource", in order to avoid confusing it with our "person or  
> organization" use of the term "entity".  Since a resource can be  
> anything, I think we can probably do without the statement.  Frank, do  
> you want to push back on this change, or are you okay with this?
>
> The term "service" (as a noun) was used in two different ways: (a) to  
> refer to a task ("X asked Y to perform a particular service"); or (b)  
> to refer to the thing that performs the task ("X sent a message to Y's  
> service").  I've tried to changes uses of sense (a) to use "task"  
> instead.
>
> Added concept definitions of "requester entity" and "provider entity".  
>  They are a little meager.  Frank may want to fill them out better,  
> but I ran out of time tonight.
>
> Whew!
>
> 1.  
> http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/%7Echeckout%7E/2002/ws/arch/wsa/wd-wsa-arch- 
> review2.html
>
>
> -- 
> David Booth
> W3C Fellow / Hewlett-Packard
> Telephone: +1.617.253.1273
>

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2004 06:43:03 UTC