OASIS Open

FAQ

Q: What is the unique value of the Symptoms Automation Framework (SAF)?

A: SAF automates responses to cross-domain situations.

Q: What technical problem is SAF trying to address?

A: It's hard for different enterprises and domains to work together to fix problems and understand and respond to their customers' needs. SAF provides a collaborative framework that enables diverse enterprises and knowledge domains to address these issues through automation at lower cost and much more effectively.

Q: What are the benefits?

A: SAF automates appropriate responses to changing business conditions, integrating contributions from diverse domains such as marketing, sales, and IT to provide competitive advantage.

Q: How does SAF relate to Cloud computing

A: SAF maps consumer business conditions to proactive Cloud provider responses. Cloud services embrace concepts such as self-service, pay-per-use, and capacity-on-demand. SAF further promotes these concepts by enabling cloud consumers and providers to both publish information about key conditions and appropriate responses that enable them to optimize their business relationship.

Q: What are the benefits of SAF in the Cloud?

A: The chasm between the business and IT is significantly widened due to the lack of context between cloud-provider and cloud-consumer. SAF bridges the chasm by enabling business-relevant conditions to enable meaningful business-relevant responses.

Q: What are the focus areas for this framework?

A: SAF can be applied to any domain or framework. The SAF TC is investigating use cases specific to IT Systems, Cloud computing, and Green IT/SmartGrid.

Q: What audiences should be interested in this work?

A: Government, industry verticals and the IT industry generally should be interested in using SAF to improve business and operational synergy.

Q: Why the use of medical terminology in the specification?

A: It provides an analogy many people understand, nothing more.

Q: How does SAF work?

A: SAF functions as a bridge. Symptoms are matched against a collaborative catalog of Syndromes and Protocols that translate those conditions into meaningful actions. Such actions might include the emission of relevant events in another domain or level of the business — thus "bridging" them.

Q: How does SAF relate to Complex Event Processing (CEP)?

A: SAF embraces the world of CEP. Symptoms are light-weight envelopes that might contain events and typically signify higher-level, usually cross-domain conditions. SAF connects contributions from enterprise partners and domains to provide new business opportunities.

Q: How does SAF relate to policy standards such as WS-Policy?

A: SAF is an ideal framework for complementing a policy-based solution. SAF can be used to map a policy statement to one or more appropriate responses at the business or IT level.

Q: How does SAF relate to Rules-Based Approaches?

A: SAF utilizes some principles from rules-based systems such as an underlying knowledge-base or set of rules contained in the SAF catalog. One could also consider the role of Diagnostician in SAF to be somewhat similar to that of an inference-engine. However, the SAF focus on collaboration across domains and pattern-matching on partial information as expressed in a loosely-coupled framework of well-defined roles creates additional opportunities for rules-based approaches.