RE: Requester/provider agent/entity terminology

I strongly agree with Frank on this.

-----Original Message-----
From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Francis McCabe
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 11:24 AM
To: Newcomer, Eric
Cc: David Booth; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Requester/provider agent/entity terminology



Eric:
   I think it would be a big mistake to take people out of the 
architecture. It might be neater from a technological POV but it would 
also be less relevant. A big part of security, trust, e-commerce, 
supply chain mgt, management etc. is *about* people.

On Jan 24, 2004, at 3:42 AM, Newcomer, Eric wrote:

>
> 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 13:58:50 UTC