OASIS Web Services Component Model (WSCM) TC

OASIS Web Services for Interactive Applications
Technical Committee

1 February 2002
teleconference 12:00-1:00pm EST
Minutes

Attendance

Agenda

1. Roll call
2. Status of Glossary
3. List of scenarios under way, and volunteers to do any additional ones
4. Review of available scenarios: Macy's/Chanel, American Express, Financial Charting, PC memory configurator, Mortgage Calculator, SmartBuyer.
5. Status of WSIA presentation
6. Karl Best on TC standard processes

Meeting

Cleaned it up, added comments, incorporated some of Dan's definitions. Suggested process is to send any new terms and potential definitions on to Jeff and he'll mark them in the Glossary as 'for review'. Also adding links to external sites where appropriate.

Also have added sections to the Business Scenario template for "proposed glossary terms" and "references". The intent of the former is to define any terms that are not yet in the Glossary and then to migrate them there when convenient, review them, etc.

12:10   Scenarios under way

Want to take inventory today and over the next couple of weeks before harvesting Use Cases, need to get a feel for if we've got the ground covered.

In addition to those listed in the agenda we also have the following under way:

• IBM - Financial Stock assessment
• IBM - Portal
• Dan - Payment Instrumentation also on its way
• Rex, Sandra - discussing doing one possibly in the .mil space
• Bob Serr ? working on one in Health Care and another on Marketing Channel syndication
• Aditi ? one involving multi-modality, multimedia
• Kevin ? supply chain scenario for adaptation and aggregation

Q: Airline scenario missing? Should probably be done since it had a cancellation operation.

Q: Sasha's list?
A: Will be sent out again, there was a problem with the distribution list/subscription.
(action: Sasha)

12:15   Review of Macy's / Chanel ? Eilon

[ Eilon walked through the Macy's / Chanel business scenario ]

Chanel control the flow and experience and the "buy" signal goes back to Macy's for fulfillment by them. Chanel is really providing product selection functionality.

Q: What if Macy's want to combine just 2 or 3 products, not the whole selection?
A: The Retail term is "assortment" and Chanel provide different assortments to different retailers, but the retailers themselves have no ability to modify the assortment that Chanel provides to them.

Q: The "balance of power" here is definitely on the producer side in this scenario. Is this representative?
A: No, cosmetics is typically not representative. In this case there are also legal agreements (eg, "no advertising" that are enforced in a legal/business sense, not just with software.

Q: Customization here is done by the producer. Typical?
A: No, it's more of an extreme probably. In this case even the logos for "brand aware" customizations (eg, Chanel at X") are built as GIFs at Chanel with a particular look.

Q: On navigation ? does the user leave the Macy's site or can we envision it as a "frame" on the Macy's site?
A: Nope, no transfer to another site, seamless experience for the user at the Macy's site. Another key point from the technology perspective is to be able to enter the boutique from different locations and exit from various locations too.

12:25   Decided to skip Amex until next time.

12:25 Financial Charting ? Dan

[ Dan walked through the Financial Charting business scenario ]

Visualize Inc., have financial charting tools, and this scenario offers us an ISV perspective, where one UI is developed and made available to business partners to adapt, reuse, and extend.

Q: Is it possible to turn this into a real-time app?
A: Reference implementation? ? hopefully a reference implementation will come out of this TC, much later.

Q: Target audience should be added to the docs? ? Likely consumers of the scenario?
A: Maybe could be done in the discussion of roles, or possibly in the categorizations of Use Cases later. We should come back to this later, maybe Use Cases will point out different roles.

There are probably new requirements coming out of this scenario, in this case the web service is hosted differently.

Q: Is there an issue with using company's names in these docs?
A: Ask permission! We already agreed in the face-to-face to having the mailing list publicly accessible.

action: Charlie - this might be an issue for OASIS Legal ? needs follow up!

action: Divine - It would be interesting to understand the controls at the data/message level in this scenario that give the ability for adaptation / extending, maybe we can get some of that detail into this doc?

12:40   Mortgage calculator ? Dean, Alan

This is a mortgage application in a portal environment, aiming to show what types of [ lightweight ] adaptations might be possible. Typically the mortgage calculator might be a loss leader encouraging consumers to utilize loan processing, credit check services, etc.

[ Dean, Alan walked through Mortgage calculator scenario ]

Q: Aim is to bundle this into something else?
A: Not really, maybe bundle it into related services. It's acting as a portlet, concerned with adaptations on that calculator.

Q: Is this scenario relevant to portlet concerns?
A: No ? with this one we know what's going on inside it, its expectations, etc. Page 3 of the doc is looking at how the calculator can be customized. It's mainly localization, eg, removing a lower range of options. But the presentation choices rest with the consumer, not the producer.

Q: Are we addiing & removing items from pages?
A: The idea is that content can change with Locale, eg, questions for credit scoring might change, even the [question] flow might want to change.

Q: Appropriate scenario for considering other devices?
A: Yes, this scenario also captures the need for adaptation to device and UI specifics. That device adaptation might be done through different markup.

• Suggestion that adding some machine-readable detail to allow flow adaptation seems appropriate.

action: Epicentric ? can we get an example of this (adaptation?)?

12:48 SmartBuyer supplier integration - Tim, Sean

[ Tim, Sean walked through SmartBuyer scenario ]

Consumers might also want to add their own rules, eg, discounts on prices, or they may only want to display a subset of the catalog. The supplier (producer) sends out one catalog list, the consumer selects what is to be displayed.

(Interesting contrast here as a lot of value is being added at the consumer end).

Q: Changes necessary to add shipping/freight into the mix?
A: Typically want to get that info not just from the product supplier but also from maybe a logistics supplier, another participant.

General feature is that in these apps we'll have one app using a supplier's commerce app and then using other apps from other suppliers.

Q: Client can add annotations?
A: Some producers alter prices, etc for clients, and sometimes discounts can be applied at the client-side. So we have adaptation of both presentation and data. Eg, at the end of purchase the buyer needs to extract the appropriate data to feed the logistics request.

1:00 Procurement scenario - Shankar

Shares Chanel and Crossweave features. Product configurators tend to have a strong user experience. Retailers also want to be able to customize and configure prices and availability, they might add product reviews and ratings, and do cross-sells with other appropriate products.

Q: Payment mechanisms different (specified at all?) in these scenarios?
A: Configurator has no payment involved, Macy's and Chanel have payment out-of-band.

action: Eilon ? Mapquest scenario might be good to elaborate as it probably has a metering payment scheme with it's consumers.

action: all ? probably give ourselves about another week to review these scenarios, introduce new ones.

action: all ? anyone interested in helping to develop a standard set of procedures, documents etc for OASIS committees such as ours should contact Karl Best.

1:05   adjourn