It's probably a
good time to think about which term we should use to
represent the potential
element responsible for invoking or initiating a
conversation with a service
acting as the service provider. Regardless of
whether this becomes an
"official" element within our reference model, we
will likely need to
reference such an element in our documentation.
Below are some
considerations we can take into account:
- Both of the position papers
submitted so far incorporate the term
"consumer". This term is also used in
the ebSOA specification.
- The W3C Web Services Architecture document
submitted by Frank McCabe uses
the term "requester" and further qualifies it
by suffixing it with "entity"
or "agent" to represent the owner and software
program respectively. (Prior
to the current version of the W3C Working Note,
this document used the term
"service requester" instead of "requester
agent".)
- The W3C Web Services Glossary does not provide a definition
for "consumer",
but defines "requester agent" as follows: "A software agent
that wishes to
interact with a provider agent in order to request that a
task be performed
on behalf of its owner - the requester entity."
-
The term "requester agent" is used in the W3C WSDL 2.0 specification,
whereas "consumer" is used in the WSDL 1.1 version.
- The definitions
document submitted by Rebekah uses the term "requester",
most likely because
the initial set of definitions were provided by Frank.
Given that we are
seeking industry-wide acceptance of our reference model,
there may be a
benefit to keeping our terminology in alignment with terms
already in use by
established (albeit implementation-specific)
specifications. I personally
have no preference, but I do recommend we
decide on one term and then
consider adding a definition to our glossary. We
may want to leverage some
of the work performed by the W3C Working Group and
decide whether we also
need separate terms to distinguish owner from
implementation.
On a
related note, we have not yet discussed the concept of a service or
service
agent assuming provider and requester/consumer roles. Such a concept
would
also affect our definitions.
Thomas
