Hi Michael,
One of the questions we asked Frank this morning
(and this example drives it home) is: How is Service Action different from
Action? Particularly if Action is defined to be the application of intent
by Participants (or Agents) in order to achieve a RWE. Based on this
definition, isn't Service Action an example of Action? Conversely, what
about the Consumer Action? If Service Action is to be called out
separately, why not Consumer [or Consumer Agent] Action?
A key point we've been iterating is that a
Service does not act until acted upon. The introduction of the
concept of Joint Action helps drive this notion home. There's a fuzzy
boundary that we're still wrestling with, i.e., what constitutes separate
Action vs. Joint Action. It's not all that clear cut, particular in
SOA-based systems where we are trying match needs with capabilities and those
entities with needs are not (or at least we assume are not) the same
entities with capabilities. It would seem to be silly to assume
otherwise, at least in terms of the scope of the RM and the RA.
In any event, I know you were unable to
attend the call today, but we decided toward the end of the day that there
should probably be some loosely defined notion of separate Action in Section 3
of the RA, but that for modeling SOA-based systems, will be focusing primarily
on Joint Action. Frank has the "action" (no pun intended) to write
something up that helps illustrate this based on a real world example. He
said he probably won't be able to get that out for a couple of weeks, but in the
meantime, we can press on with Joint Action.
Bye for now...
- Jeff
