Re: Hypermedia workflow

+1

On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 04:05  AM, Miles Sabin wrote:

>
> Assaf Arkin wrote,
>> In fact, my experience, just like yours, proves that any multi-party
>> choreography can be broken down into a set of two-party interactions,
>> and any set of two-party interactions that is performed in the proper
>> order would result in a multi-party interaction.
>
> I think it's uncontroversial that from a technical point of view this
> transformation can always be done in principle. I'm less sure that the
> resulting pairwise protocol would always have desirable efficiency and
> robustness characteristics ... eg., wrt efficiency, compare true
> broadcast with a pairwise emulation; or wrt robustness, the pairwise
> protocol might depend on an auxiliary coordinator which might be a
> single point of failure.
>
> From a non-technical point of view, I'm worried that legal
> considerations might get in the way of reducing multi-party to pairwise
> interactions: in a jurisdiction which recognizes multi-party agreements
> as legal primitives it could be the case that a transformation to
> pairwise agreements changes the legal landscape in unexpected or
> unfortunate ways. Maybe there just aren't any jurisdictions which
> recognize primitive multi-party agreements, in which case this is a
> non-problem. But nobody has managed to provide me with convincing
> evidence that this is so (yet), and I can't think of any a priori
> reason why it should be.
>
> And even if the legalities are pairwise-friendly, it might still be the
> case that informal business agreements are often multi-party, with an
> only hazy connection with background legally binding pairwise
> agreements. Those informal agreements might Just Work sufficiently well
> in enough cases that any disconnect with the legal background aren't
> troublesome. On the contrary, aligning a practical multi-party
> agreement with a strictly legally binding set of pairwise agreements
> might be too time-consuming and expensive to be worthwhile. The problem
> here is that automating this stuff would be dependent on that alignment
> being done upfront, and that might be a significant obstacle.
>
> I for one don't know how to begin to answer these last questions ...
> this looks more like territory for lawyers and sociologists than for
> protocol designers.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Miles
>