| Andrew,
After my initial activity with the group, I have been too busy to even lurk, but your email subject caught my eye and I read your blog.
I wish I had time to reply in some depth but I'll just throw a few (random) things your way.
Your information oriented approach seems to go back to OO roots in that the data object (and specific instances of it) is the thing and its associated methods are actions you can do with it. So from an SOA standpoint, we need to do several things. First, we need to provide a way to have more functions to do things with the data than just its associated methods. The data object is very much "owned" by someone and the private methods are what the owner can do that the public cannot. And if the owner doesn't give you the ability to manipulate the data in some way, you are out of luck. The data steward approach requires the functional flexibility of SOA.
And while information is critical, having information is not enough. The question getting the most attention right now is what are you trying to accomplish and how can you do it. Part of the answer is knowing what information exists and how to get hold of it. Information by itself has limited use -- it is how you find it and combine it that is the dominant challenge (at least today).
Your thoughts on semantics are where my initial engagement with the group left off. For all the talk of Communities of Interest (COIs) and common vocabularies, groups have their own vocabularies (i.e. jargon) to suit the needs of communicating in the group and for the purposes that the group exists. I have long advocated the need for a Mediation/Semantic Negotiation/(pick a name) service that helps connect vocabularies. A broker is a prime example of the user of such a service. Your buyer should be able to make requests in its vocabulary and have answers come back in its vocabulary. The seller should be able to get requests from any buyer in the *seller's* vocabulary because how else can the seller best understand what the buyer wants. I want my seller to concentrate on their business of supplying value through products and business services and I want the buyer to concentrate on getting things that will enable them to supply value through their products and business services. The broker needs to be able to deal with buyers and sellers using a variety of vocabularies and to combine results from a number of sources to give a meaningful answer. None of these should have to deal with the esoteric details of translating vocabularies and deriving meaning.
As an aside, while it is very appealing to say, "Let's just all agree on what we call things," (and this should be used whenever it can be successful), the basic process of doing this doesn't scale. My diagram for attempts at doing this is the following (I hope the paste shows up at your end)
Yes, the Semantic Web has a focus for capturing and transmitting meaning and ontology work (of which OWL, the Web Ontology Language is a part) deals with formalism for representing knowledge and inferring additional knowledge from the stuff explicitly captured by the representation. Advances here should surface as (to use SOA-RM concepts and wording) the underlying capabilities to which services will provide access. In other words, this is where your mediation services come from.
One last thought (again from SOA-RM): in SOA, services are the mechanisms by which needs (e.g. your buyer) and capabilities (e.g your seller) are brought together. (Adding the intermediary of the broker doesn't add anything but an entity with both needs and capabilities.) SOA does not provide any domain elements of a solution that do not exist without SOA. I like to say that SOA provides the business service of connectivity.
Well, this has gone on linger than I anticipated. I hope it provides some value.
Ken On Apr 8, 2006, at 12:27 PM, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
All,
I've been pulling some various threads of thought together over the last couple of days, and I've written some of them down. They're relevant to some of the more further afield discussions we've been having, so I don't want to drop it all into a mail. Our main focus should be about the demo.
However, I would appreciate the thoughts of the collective brain power here as we've all been part of the same discussions. You can feel free to send comments to me directly, add them to the blog or whatever you see fit. I am very interested in any feedback you may have.
The post is here:
Cheers,
ast -- Join me in Dubrovnik, Croatia on May 8-10th when I will be speaking at
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