Re: Choreography and the Semantic Web

On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 04:28:47PM -0400, Champion, Mike wrote:
> Uhh, you certainly can have a SOAP/WSDL web service that returns the current
> temperature at some location, and have it return with a SOAP message that
> says "the termperature is 33 degrees celsius."

Well sure, but my point - which you appear to be agreeing with - was that
SOAP/WSDL/etc.. don't do what RDF does.

>  The difference is that the
> SOAP/WSDL does this by reference to hard-coded semantics ... the designers,
> producers, and consumers of the service "just know" what temperature,
> degrees, celsius, etc. "mean" and this is reflected in program code
> Presumably RDF could reference or encode an ontology that knows what these
> terms mean, and they could be extended or tweaked without re-writing any
> program code.

Mostly right, but which approach is taken is independant of the
technology used to get the data there.  So whether you used HTTP GET to
return plain old XML, SOAP/WSDL to return RDF, or some other combo, what
you accurately describe is purely a property of the data.

As an aside, I think the reason few (if any) are considering using RDF
with SOAP/WSDL, is that the common use of SOAP/WSDL already requires a
priori knowledge of the specific service being used, so there's no
benefit to a generic format over a specific one.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               [email protected]
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com