Re: Choreography and the Semantic Web

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 02:24:32PM -0400, David W. Levine wrote:
> At the end of the day, software can only couple up to the 
> services and
> resources it understands. A program attempting to determine the current 
> temperature
> in New York City is not only likely to understand what a thermometer is, it 
> is unlikely
> to want to talk to anything that *isn't* a thermometer. Ignoring, for the 
> moment, how it
> came to chose a specific URI to invoke, a program trying to interact with 
> another chunk
> of code is going to be able to do no more, and no less than what it is 
> programmed to do.

What if the software just reads thermometer values and logs it, i.e. has
no specific understanding of what a "temperature" is, but does know what
a "metered value" is?  Then this software should be usable with water
meters, barometers, odometers, etc...

This is nothing new, of course.  For the sake of reusability, we've been
making these calls since software was first developed.  Why it's
different in the context of Internet-scale distributed computing, is
that there exists a coordination problem that isn't present in other
environments, where a single administrative domain exists[1] (in various
forms).  In this environment, late binding is absolutely required if the
system is going to see widespread use, for all the reasons I've talked
about since SOAP 1.0.

 [1] http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1681

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