Re: Relationship between SOAP data model, SOAP encoding, and RPC

Henrik,

Regarding your Issue 1., you might be interested in recent work of the RDF
Core WG; we ran into similar issues with the old RDF Model and Syntax
spec. It didn't separate clearly enough some aspects of the graph model
from the RDF 1.0 XML concrete syntax.
More recently we've couched our work in terms of a canonical textual
representation of the graph as 3-tuples, and have been addressing various
RDF open issues in terms of test cases articulated using this  "n-triples"
dump format.

See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore for the WG home page, and
    http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/ntriples/ for the graph dump syntax.

Work is also progressing on a more formal (model theoretic) account of
RDF's abstract information model. It sounds like there is some overlap
with SOAP concerns, so I'll keep this list copied with any new
publications from the RDFCore WG in this area.

I remember Hugo posted some work recently that extracted testable
assertions from the SOAP spec, that might be used for implementation
testing. If anyone is looking at a test suite for SOAP pt5 graph encoding,
I'd be very interested to hear about the methodology being adopted...

cheers,

Dan

On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen wrote:

>
> As part of the discussions about the SOAP RPC convention in section 7
> [1] and how it relates to section 5 [2], the RPC taskforce are
> considering the following clarification outlined below. Before we spend
> cycles on doing any edits, we would like to get input on whether this is
> a reasonable position or whether there are reasons for not doing it.
>
> This mail is my attempt to summarize the proposal to a larger audience -
> please comment as appropriate.
>
> Issue 1: SOAP Section 5 currently defines a directed graph data model
> with elements like struct, array, id/href, etc. *as well as* a
> particular encoding of that data model without clearly separating the
> two.
>
> Clarification 1: We would like to clarify the relationship between the
> data model and the particular encoding by saying that the SOAP encoding
> is one of several potential encodings of the SOAP data model.
>
> Issue 2: The formulation of the definition of the root attribute is
> obscure
>
> Clarification 2: The SOAP Root attribute defined in section 5.6 [3] is
> part of the SOAP encoding and can be used to disambiguate roots from
> non-roots when this is not apparent from the encoded instance.
>
> Issue 3: The relationship between section 5 and section 7 is unclear
>
> Clarification 3: Make clear that the RPC convention is based on the SOAP
> data model and point out that the RPC invocation or the result of an
> invocation is modeled as a single-rooted instance of the SOAP data model
> where the root of the instance is the RPC invocation or the result of
> the RPC invocation.
>
> As for any other data modeled using the SOAP data model, the RPC
> convention can use the SOAP encoding to represent an instance of an RPC
> invocation or the result of an invocation. In case the SOAP encoding is
> used and a single root can not be unambiguously determined, the SOAP
> Root attribute can be used to determine roots from non-roots.
>
> Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
> mailto:henrikn@microsoft.com
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-20010709/#_Toc478383512
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-20010709/#_Toc478383532
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-20010709/#_Toc478383501
>

Received on Tuesday, 14 August 2001 14:00:46 UTC