Another thing to point out, even a yes/no decision is an obligation
about granting or denying permission. The order scenario makes the
obligation conditional rather than just responding with yes or no. If
the answer from the decision point is yes or no, then obligation
conditions will most often not be returned.
Danny
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [soa-rm-ra] Policy Types
From: Don Flinn <>
Date: Sun, June 01, 2008 4:22 am
To: soa-rm-ra <>
As defined in Fig 46 pp 74 - Policy is either a permission or an
obligation
I believe that certain business policies do not fit within either policy
class. There are machine readable policies that mandate that a computer
follow a specific course of action depending on the state of the
ecosystem. While there may be an obligation on the policy writer to
write a policy to follow certain criteria, the policy writen for the
machine has no such abiguity. An obligation is the act of binding
oneself (in the service case, itself) to follow a particular course of
action, which the service may or may not do. Given a particular state
of the ecosystem the machine MUST follow the course of action dictated
by the policy.
For example:
A company has a policy that states; if the order flow is greater than
some number, orders MUST go to warehouse B else they MUST go to
warehouse A. This is not a permission and I have a hard time conceiving
this as an obligation. In my example the service has no choice but to
use the given address / endpoint depending on the state of the
ecosystem. So it seems to me that the positive & negative policy
constraints are aggregates of permissions, obligations and what I'll
tentively call - instructions.
One of the purposes of SOA is to facilitate the replacement of humans by
machines. In order to do this, the machines must be made more
"intelligent", i.e. they must be able to autonomously handle variations
in the ecosystem, as far as possible. Properly written business
policies support this.
I believe that the number of business policies giving direction and
instructions to the machines to cope with varying circumstances will be
in the majority.
Don
--
Don Flinn
President
Mansurus LLC
e-mail:
Tel: 781-856-7230
http://mansurus.com
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