Re: Choreography and the Semantic Web

On Saturday, August 10, 2002, at 07:40  PM, Champion, Mike wrote:
>
> Is there some modus vivendi possible here? ... along the lines of a WSA
> framework that is rich to describe the *principles* of coordination,
> conversations, reliability in a useful way that is abstract enough to be
> implemented with either a stack of special purpose schemas and layers on 
> top
> of SOAP, or with specific ontologies expressed in a general purpose 
> semantic
> language?
>

I believe that something like this is exactly what we are looking for -- a 
framework that is supportive enough of smart automatic navigation will 
also be supportive of all the myriad ways that humans want to interact as 
well.



> In my humble, personal, not-speaking-from-the-chair opinion, this sounds
> like an old, old story in the software industry: the "next big thing"
> supposedly can't get off the ground because standards need to be put in
> place, or tools need to be built, or the guardians of the old paradigm 
> have
> to die out or give up so that the new can flourish. (Sorry, I know SW 
> people
> hate being compared to AI people, but this argument is eerily similar to 
> AI
> advocacy circa 1985.)  The trouble is that the the really good ideas 
> succeed
> despite all this, most notably the World Wide Web. [See Clayton
> Christensen's THE INNOVATORS DILEMMA for a bunch of other examples of
> "disruptive" innovations in a wide variety of fields]. Web standards were
> initially built in order to control the explosion of innovative ideas that
> threatened the interoperability of the Web, they weren't needed to produce
> widespread adoption.  Tools were created to meet the demand, they weren't
> needed to create the demand for web pages, CGI scripts, etc.  And the old
> guard might not have been the first to jump on the Web bandwagon, but they
> didn't try to stop it either (I guess they ignored the bandwagon until it
> was obvious that it was time to jump on, and they did so with a vengance)
> .
>
>



> As I see it, the WSA has to rise above the alphabet soup of the various
> proposed standards du jour, but we can't rise up into the clouds and 
> expect
> the semantic web technologies to sort it out someday Real Soon Now either.
>  .
> We have to make sense out of today's technology as it is applied to real
> problems (as the WSCI, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction, etc. proposals try
> to do), and we have to leave room for this to be subsumed by
> RDS/DAML-S/OWL-based tools when/if they mature.
>
>

Again +1 for this one. As a relative W3C `outsider', I have been somewhat 
dismayed (hey, I'm English,  I can use words like dismayed) by the fairly 
flagrant ignorance of traditional software engineering principles.

Frank