Web Services Architecture Working Group
3-October- meeting minutes

Working Group home page · Meeting records

Attendance

Present

AT&T Mark Jones
BEA Systems David Orchard
Carnegie Mellon University Katia Sycara
ChevronTexaco Roger Cutler
Computer Associates Igor Sedukhin
Contivo Dave Hollander
Fujitsu Frank McCabe
Hewlett-Packard Company Zulah Eckert
IBM Chris Ferris
IONA Eric Newcomer
Nokia Michael Mahan
Oracle Corporation Jeff Mischkinsky
Oracle Corporation Martin Chapman
Progress Colleen Evans
Rogue Wave Software Allen Brookes
SAP Sinisa Zimek
Software AG Michael Champion
Sterling Commerce(SBC) Suresh Damodaran
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Doug Bunting

Thompson Corporation Hao He

W. W. Grainger, Inc. Daniel Austin
W. W. Grainger, Inc. Tom Carroll
W3C David Booth
webMethods, Inc. Prasad Yendluri
W3C Hugo Haas

Regrets

Apple, Mike Brumbelow

Cisco Systems Inc Sandeep Kumar

DaimlerChrysler Research Hans-Peter Steiert
DaimlerChrysler Research Mario Jeckle
Ericsson Nilo Mitra
France Telecom Shishir Garg
Hewlett-Packard Company Yin-Leng Husband
Ipedo Srinivas Pandrangi
Macromedia Glen Daniels
SeeBeyond Technology Corp Ugo Corda
The Thomson Corporation Hao He
TIBCO Software, Inc. Scott Vorthmann
T-Nova Deutsche Telekom Jens Meinkoehn
W3C Hugo Haas

Agenda

See agenda posted by the Chair.

Detailed minutes

1.Roll call 

2. Scribe assigned (Katia Sycara)

3. Last week's telecon minutes approved

4 MikeC: David Orchard fulfilled his action item, 
but action item not closed yet until we are done with the requirements.

5. Zulah reports on the Management TF. The TF keeps records of their 
discussions but do not publish them yet on the public mailing list
MikeC: suggests for the group to compy with Hugo's requirements re W3C rules.
Zulah: agrees to facilitate this compliance.

Discussion of  Hugo's wish to participate in the MTF 
Zulah says anyone who would like to participate should contact her, 
and also Mike C and David H, as well as Hether and Hugo.. 

Discussion as to stardardization of terminology for the MTF.
Zulah: agrees to facilitate compliance of Hugo's request to 
post the MTF e-mails to the archives. 
Zulah: reports that the MTF is in the process of developing 
Web Services Management conceptual view in addition to the Architectural 
view. This Management conceptual model would be done by end of 
October (the time frame agreed at the f2f). 
Zulah: feels confident that this is progressing in a timely manner.

6. Requirements document status report 

MikeC: Decision to publish as a working draft. It will be a 
living document but the group will not be spending much time on this.
Daniel: intends to publish new version to the group tonight with 
an intended publication date Monday 10/07/02. The  intention is to publish 
it as a semi final version. The editors feel that the document is complete 
to a large extend. However,  there should be a process to make additions
 or modifications to the document. These changes are expected to be 
infrequent.  Tonight the document will be released to the group, 
so that the group can give feedback by Monday.

The group agreed on the intent and publication date. 

Grateful thanks were extended by the chairs to the editors especially 
Daniel and Chris.

7. MikeC: Hugo's review of SOAP attachment features was sent to the list. 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2002Oct/0018.html
Not much e-mail discussion. Since Hugo is not present, we can defer the 
discussion till next week. 

8. Proposal for the creation of a W3C Choreography Working Group 
MikeC: summarized http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ws-arch/2002Oct/0005.html 
to the wsawg on the subject of the choreography proposal. 
The web services coordination group (wsawg chairs, plus representation
from W3C management)  reviewed the choreography document.
The W3C management committee (one from each company) starts Nov 18, 
they will be presented with the proposal and  will be asked for their 
approval. The presentation to the AC will include results of their 
consulatation with the stakeholders. 

The opinion of a substantial percentage of the Coordinating Group 
(excluding the wsag chairs) said that the choreography charter
was loosely defined, and expressed concerns that, if the choreography
group was initiated with such a vague charter,  it may take it a long time
till the objectives, scope etc are clearly defined the CG believes that the W3C
would need more guidance. Hence the CG strongly advised (1) that the wsawg group
should make enough progress in the wsa framework so that choreography can be
better delineated, and (2) that the wsawg should revise the choreography 
proposal to make it more concrete.

The chairs asked the wsawg group to affirm or not whether the wsawg 
understands what happened. 

Let the minutes reflect that the group affirmed that they understand 
what has happened. 

DanielA: asks for clarification of the next steps for the wsawg regarding 
the advice of the CG. 
MikeC: that this task could potentially be a distration from our current 
progress in the wsa framework, on the other hand it could be an accelerator. 
Hopefully wsdl would fit neatly, perhaps not wsci. But trying to fit these 
in the wsa framework may give our group a better understanding of our progress 
in defining the framework. 

FrankMC: the choreography group, taking time to market into consideration,
perhaps worded the proposed charter less tightly than they might have.
Mike C:says that time to market is for the spec not for the group. The wish 
of the Coordination Group would be that the choreography group would be better 
off if some additional up front thinking is done. 

MarkJ: proposes to "go with the flow", ie take up these assignments from the 
CG He recommends to get someone familiar with both specs to compare and contrast
MikeC: says the CG could volunteer people for this. Also people should 
look at their colleagues for  experts, also some of the WSCI people could be 
asked  to join the wsawg, or join our teleconfs or write something up.
 
MikeC: also says that this activity is aligned with the purpose of forming the 
choreography group in the first place, since few of us are choreography experts.
JeffM: volunteered to get people to help in this effort.

MarkC: With respect to the issue of infrasturcture vs business issues, to 
his reading, most of choreography proposal addresses technical issues,
not business ones. 
MikeC: said the CG made this point.

DaveO: cannot comit any allocation of resources, but refining in the 
architecture document areas of descriptions of choreography is a good 
thing. He likes the approach, but recommends providing a moderately scoped
diving down within next level of detail, not spending  much time of the 
whole wsa group on detailing this.
MikeC: suggests to perhaps appoint a TF to pursue this. But at a rough level 
only, perhaps breadth first so we can add value to the choreography scoping 
dicusssions.

DaveH: This will be a topic of the next meeting of W3C forum. 
He agrees with what DavidO said. Better to take one step further to our
document, than spend a lot of time to detail. Working definitions of 
coordination vs collaboration, choreography vs orchestration, how state 
impacts choreography etc and how they map on the architecture coul be 
very useful  in the presentation.

DaveO: reported that  TAG had a f2f meeting (in which DavidO was present) 
where some conversations on choreograhy took place. Tin Berners Lee 
directly ask DavidO why the wsawg had not yet published a framework for 
choreography. DavidO interprets this as an indication that as Tim is 
enthusiastic about choreography. 
MikeC: yes, we want to capture choreography  at the coarse level in the wsa.

FrankMC: on a technical level, the bottom part of scoping of choreography is
much more clear than the top. Architecture's principal role is to draw a box 
where choreography should fit.
Daniel reports on experience he had  with presenting to the AC a propoposal
for a new group. He urges the group to be focused and have the scope nailed 
down. He had a bad experience with a wg descendent from XM. 
The proposers went though 3 charters and lots of work before the 
working group was finally formed.  
MikeC: we must be prepared.

Suresh: choreography of what? Web services. But, we do not know clearly what 
web services are. We can talk about choreograhy only of things we know, 
so it will come down  to choreographing  wsdl and soap.

Roger: Where do the business issues come from in the ACs comments? 
MikeC: the AC was asking where to draw the line between business issues 
and infrastructure issues. 

Roger: we should give a thought as to what is infrasturcture and what business
JeffM: we had talked whether the scope would be ok to narrow down to the 
wsci scope. Is that narrowing what the AC is looking for?
MikeC: they want us to go through specs and find out the good ideas there.

JeffM: how can a group of 3 predict how the group of 300 is going to react?
What value can we bring and distill in the ensuing weeks?
FrankMC: it is not just a matter of terminilogy, but if we can define 
terms clearly, it is a good thing to do in order to avoid fruitless 
discussions during the meeting.

JeffM: can the W3C sponsor a workshop to start the discussion going, 
since the management may not produce results till much later.
Sinisa: It shouldn't be too hard to put together some slides to compare 
wsci with the other specs (eg wsfl+xlang )etc.
DavidH: we would be grateful to anyone who would submit such a comparison 
or analysis of these specs.
Sinisa: we cannot just stop at the comparison, we must organize on how
to proceed with the spec we have on the table, i.e. the concrete boxes
in the wsa framework, and set up a structure. 
Sinisa: offered to volunteer someone from his development group.

MikeC: It is not exactly clear what the scope of the AC request is, but the goal
is to help the AC understand what the scope of the choreography proposal is.
MarkChapman: we need to extract from the specs the essence.

DaveH: Let the minutes reflect that the chairs solicit 
(1) any and all substantive analysis with respect to the above issues 
on choreography (specs comparison, analysis, etc), 
(2) proposals of how to proceed with the AC meeting and 
(3) someone  to volunteer to act as a glosary agent to capture all 
definitions to be applied to the term(s) (choreography and related terms)

Action for chairs: to send out an e-mail with these solicitations.

9. Eric: sent last night a draft of the wsa document. 
He outlines the approach he is taken (also in his email of 10/03/2002 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2002Oct/0038.html 
Bottom up view, top down, execution flow. He started with the consensus 
f2f diagram. Also will expand this from the basic architecture to an 
extended arch to represent extended functionality. This corresponds to 
the existing current implementations that are out there now. Architectural 
basic arch is well represented in the group. We can also try to represent 
the extensibility and describe the overarching security, management etc.

Eric: has two questions:
Needs feedback on the approach (simple diagram first then expand)
Second: to what point should examples be introduced?
DaveO: thanks  Eric, work looks pretty good. There is information that is not 
caputured in the document. How should it be represented? An appendix or tutorial,
 or other?
Eric: the work is not finished, the additional info should be included somehow.

10. Label for top node of the triangle diagram.
DaveO: summary for top node label., he sent a message yesterday. How can we come 
to closure on this? No solution to make everyone happy. Many people can live with
 Discovery Agency but not many people actually like it. Many people feel ok with 
Registry, but some cannot live with it 
DavidB: we can label it, "web,/registry, etc". another suggestion is to simply
 admit more than one diagram, tried to send examples but his e-mail failed. 
More than one diagram reflects more than one way of doing it.
Roger: I do not like web or web, like D-Registry (draft Registry) so we 
can come back to it.
DaveO: I push back on the term "web" and have described my objections in e-mail
DaveB: they have not been described in e-mail
DaveO: no one of us will get what they want exactly. This is just one box and 
one term. We have about 50 more. So we should think about scalability of our 
group, how to define these terms
Igor: propose series of straw polls to resolve the naming issues.
DaveO: this is sort of what I did in my summary.
Doug: there has been fair amount of pushback for "the web" (a) scope is too big,
 what is the web excluding? (b) for similar reason , how does the web help with 
the pub/sub? So, going with Igor, the web is not on our list of considerations 
right tnow.

MikeC: Can David O construct a straw poll? 
DavidO: how many people on the call can live with registry, web,
 discovery agency? 

MikeC: let us do it in e-mail.
MikeC calls for a straw poll of those present in the telecon. 
As to those wanting Regisrty vs those wanting Discovery Agencies

Results:
Registry : 6 
Discovery Agencies: 7
Cannot live with "Registry":2
Cannot live with "Discovery Agencies": 2

MikeC: So, no quick resolution, we will have e-mail voting

Chairs will take an action item to clarify the policy on the format for sending
(e.g. html) and will inform the wsag.

Summary of new action items

http://www.w3.org/2002/10/03-ws-arch-irc
    

Chair: Mike Champion <[email protected]>
Scribe: Katia Sycara