Minutes of the meeting of the Negotiation sub-team on December 19, 2001

By

Neelakantan Kartha

 

Attendees

Neelakantan Kartha (Sterling)

Kevin Liu (SAP)

Heiko Ludwig (IBM)

Marty Sachs (IBM)

Jean Zheng (Vitria)

 

Administrative

The next call will be on January 2, 2002 and will be sponsored by Vitia. Jean will send out information on how to call in soon.

Notes

Summary

The discussion ranged over section 2.6.4 (Some details of the automated negotiation process) and section 2.7 (Negotiation CPPs). There was a consensus that the information to be negotiated should be captured in a separate document (as opposed to extending the CPP to a negotiation CPP that contains the information).\

Details

All line numbers refer to the version that Marty posted on December 6th, 2001

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ebxml-cppa-negot/200112/msg00003.html

Section 2.6.4: Heiko suggested a third party might suggest a CPA template (as opposed to either of the two parties to a CPA (line 225). Kartha suggested distinguishing clearly between two cases in the text (for instance, on line 228): one where a CPA template is used and one where a CPA is formed by negotiating between two CPPs. Regarding line 229, Jean asked what is meant by a CPA being complete. Marty responded by saying that it means that all the items that are negotiated on receive legal values. Kevin asked what is meant by a negotiation CPP. Marty replied that it means a CPP with some additional information (such as what is being negotiated, the range of values over which negotiation is done etc.) represented. Regarding line 238, Kartha asked what it meant to negotiate over a business process. Marty replied that it means choosing a business process among the several possible supplied choices, but that it did not mean negotiating over the content of a business process. Kartha concurred and suggested that we make it clear that only a syntactic matching of business process names is in scope for the first version and that we do not consider semantic issues.

Section 2.7: After some discussion, there was consensus that it is better to keep the part that is being negotiated over in a separate document (called Negotiation Document) In particular, it was decided that this document contains only the parts that were relevant to the negotiation. It was decided to abandon the notion of a negotiation CPP that would be a superset of a CPP with negotiation ranges etc. included.

The main reasons were

  1. Modularity and the difficulty in keeping the negotiation CPP in sync with the regular CPP, as the regular CPP evolves over time (pointed out by Kevin and Kartha)
  2. The possibility of having one regular CPP referred to by several negotiation documents (pointed out by Marty)

Kartha observed that defining what goes into the Negotiation Document is a key activity of this group. He suggested that taking a detailed look at a CPP to see what is negotiable will give us ideas on what to put in this document.

Heiko brought up the issue of what the contents of a CPP should be in the presence of this Negotiation Document. Specifically, if a value of a parameter is to be negotiated over, what should the value of this parameter in the CPP? Kartha asked the question whether it mattered, as there was going to be negotiation on this parameter anyway. It was decided to postpone detailed discussion of this issue due to lack of time.

Kevin observed that we might need to rethink the term Negotiation CPP, since we are moving away from that concept. There was general agreement on this. He also raised the issue whether we are going to consider negotiations over service level agreements. Marty observed that service level agreements were not a part of the current version of the spec, but encouraged discussion on whether it should be part of the next version of the CPP/CPA spec. Kartha observed that this would be useful from the perspective of WebServices also.