Re: [soa-rm] Requesters vs. Consumers

[Francis McCabe <fgm@fla.fujitsu.com>]

A follow up:
  I agree that we don't want to go around defining ownership etc. It is 
outside our remit.

  However, there are several potential -ilities that we may need to 
consider: security, manageability, privacy, etc. Most of these impinge 
directly on the issue of control.

Frank

On Apr 1, 2005, at 9:46 AM, Duane Nickull wrote:

> Francis:
>
> I concur.
>
> I think that some of these concept map ideas were the start of the 
> death spiral for the W3C Web Services Architecture.  I was never 
> convinced that the concept of an "owner" was relevant to a generic 
> architecture like the WSA, and I am even less convinced that such a 
> concept belongs in a reference model.
>
> In previous groups, we have been warned about adding anything of a 
> legal nature in OASIS specs due to the pandora's box it opens.
>
> Duane
>
> Francis McCabe wrote:
>
>> We originally wanted to use the term *legal entity* to represent the 
>> 'owner' of the agent(s) participating. However, we were advised by 
>> W3C's legal whatever that this was not a good choice. (Too 
>> politically charged apparently); there was also the possibility of an 
>> un-owned agent participating (the mind boggles a bit at this). 
>> However, in common usage, legal entity includes people and 
>> corporations.
>>
>> This is a tricky area, on the one hand it seems blinkered to pretend 
>> that we are not designing systems for and on behalf of people. On the 
>> other hand, taking people fully into account seems to take us into 
>> realms where our expertise is not appropriate.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 31, 2005, at 5:17 PM, Thomas Erl wrote:
>>
>>> It's probably a good time to think about which term we should use to
>>> represent the potential element responsible for invoking or 
>>> initiating a
>>> conversation with a service acting as the service provider. 
>>> Regardless of
>>> whether this becomes an "official" element within our reference 
>>> model, we
>>> will likely need to reference such an element in our documentation.
>>>
>>> Below are some considerations we can take into account:
>>>
>>> - Both of the position papers submitted so far incorporate the term
>>> "consumer". This term is also used in the ebSOA specification.
>>>
>>> - The W3C Web Services Architecture document submitted by Frank 
>>> McCabe uses
>>> the term "requester" and further qualifies it by suffixing it with 
>>> "entity"
>>> or "agent" to represent the owner and software program respectively. 
>>> (Prior
>>> to the current version of the W3C Working Note, this document used 
>>> the term
>>> "service requester" instead of "requester agent".)
>>>
>>> - The W3C Web Services Glossary does not provide a definition for 
>>> "consumer",
>>> but defines "requester agent" as follows: "A software agent that 
>>> wishes to
>>> interact with a provider agent in order to request that a task be 
>>> performed
>>> on behalf of its owner - the requester entity."
>>>
>>> - The term "requester agent" is used in the W3C WSDL 2.0 
>>> specification,
>>>  whereas "consumer" is used in the WSDL 1.1 version.
>>>
>>> - The definitions document submitted by Rebekah uses the term 
>>> "requester",
>>> most likely because the initial set of definitions were provided by 
>>> Frank.
>>>
>>> Given that we are seeking industry-wide acceptance of our reference 
>>> model,
>>> there may be a benefit to keeping our terminology in alignment with 
>>> terms
>>> already in use by established (albeit implementation-specific)
>>> specifications. I personally have no preference, but I do recommend 
>>> we
>>> decide on one term and then consider adding a definition to our 
>>> glossary. We
>>> may want to leverage some of the work performed by the W3C Working 
>>> Group and
>>> decide whether we also need separate terms to distinguish owner from
>>> implementation.
>>>
>>> On a related note, we have not yet discussed the concept of a 
>>> service or
>>> service agent assuming provider and requester/consumer roles. Such a 
>>> concept
>>> would also affect our definitions.
>>>
>>> Thomas
>>
>>
>
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