I've always contended that service consumer was necessary, but in
terms of this particular discussion, if the object is to avoid adding
a Service Consumer to the equation of the RM, we could call this Role
"Intermediary," if "Broker" is also verboten. However, in terms of
keeping it simple, sweetheart, it's still a consumer. I don't expect
to see a consumer in the RM, nor am I arguing to open up the issue. I
have accepted it and prefer moving on to deliver a spec sooner rather
than later.
Ciao,
Rex
At 2:36 PM -0500 12/6/05, Metz Rebekah wrote:
>I agree with Ken. If we return to the definition of service again;
>there is some <entity> that provides the service. Say my brother
>Isaac has a falafel stand and offer a falafel service. There are
>several ways to define the 'falafel service,' but they are ancillary
>to the point I am trying to make here. Isaac is the service
>provider. If I want to avail myself of a falafel, I consume the
>service. If I don't really want to get up off the couch and walk to
>the falafel stand, I could choose instead to use a delivery service
>like 'Dr. Delivery' to provide the falafel instead. I am still a
>consumer. However, I am a consumer of the delivery service which
>provides its own unique service. >From my perspective, the delivery
>service does in fact function as a broker to multiple services - say
>to falafel, pizza, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and burgers but that is
>the service I wanted. Nonetheless, that function does not negate
>the role that the delivery played when interacting with the falafel
>service - that of a service consumer.
>
>Essentially, a broker is a compilation of at least two distinct
>interactions - one in which it plays the consumer and one in which
>it plays the provider.
>
>Rebekah
>
>Rebekah Metz
>Associate
>Booz Allen Hamilton
>Voice: (703) 377-1471
>Fax: (703) 902-3457
>
>
>From: Ken Laskey [mailto:]
>Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 2:02 PM
>To: ; ;
>; ; ;
>;
>Cc:
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>
>I could argue that a broker consumes the service on someone else's
>behalf. In reality, service actor seems too nondescriptive because
>either the consumer or the provider can be thought of as an actor.
>
>Ken
>
>At 01:45 PM 12/6/2005, wrote:
>
>I hate to stir things up a bit, but can you change the service
>consumer term to service actor?
>Since in the case of brokering the service actor is not consuming
>but brokering a request to another service.
>The broker service can be a service actor upon the service but might
>not really consume any part of the service since it is a pass
>through.
>
>But I guess this is a matter of opinion.
>
>- Dan
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Ken Laskey [ mailto:]
>Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 10:39 AM
>To: Duane Nickull; Goran Zugic; Matt MacKenzie; MATHEWS, Tim; Sally
>St. Amand;
>Cc:
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>I think we need to add some words to the RM to capture this
>discussion. We cover part of this in the beginning of Section 3.2.1
>but need to be more specific that:
>- a service consumer can be a human or a software agent;
>- a service consumer can invoke any number of services (including a
>single service in isolation) and can chain the output of some
>services to act as the input of others;
>- from the perspective of a given service, the occurrence of such
>chaining would not be visible;
>- the service consumer can be implementing a business process;
>- the specific of a business process do not change the basic SOA
>concepts as described in the RM; however, the specific architecture
>that one designs and implements will reflect the business process
>and make use of specific service instances that corresponds to the
>real world effects that the business process hopes to realize.
>Now that said, and in full appreciation that we agreed earlier that
>mechanisms which combine services (e.g. choreography, orchestration)
>are out of scope, is it sufficient for words, such as those
>suggested above, to be included somewhere within the current
>discussion or do we need to pull it out into a subsection on its
>own? As an example of the former, we tried to deal with
>loose-coupling and coarse-grained with words at the end of Section
>2.1.
>Ken
>At 12:23 PM 12/6/2005, Duane Nickull wrote:
>
>Goran:
>
>I slightly disagree with your assertions, probably based on
>semantics. For a service to "participate" in a process, it would
>have to be aware of the process (which many will not be). A better
>way to depict this may be to state "services may be aggregated and
>used by processes" and "processes may be represented/exposed as
>services". There are really no limits to the number of layers that
>can be present. Attached is a UML CVD depicting such.
>
>A key rationale of why process is not part of SOA is that services
>cannot see process. They are not aware of whether they are being
>called as part of a process vs. as an individual service. If the
>"s" part of SOA cannot see or touch that, it cannot be part of the
>RM.
>
>The chicken and egg discussion you bring forward is a requirement
>for those building services to strongly consider the business
>process when designing their service infrastructure. Accordingly,
>it is not really part of the RM for SOA yet I agree that it is a
>very important consideration.
>
>For your messages to get to the list, you must join as a "applicant"
>rather than an "observer" as per OASIS process.
>
>Duane
>
>*******************************
>Adobe Systems, Inc. - <http://www.adobe.com/>http://www.adobe.com
>Vice Chair - UN/CEFACT http://www.uncefact.org/
>Chair - OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee
>Personal Blog -
><http://technoracle.blogspot.com/>http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
>*******************************
>
>
>From: Goran Zugic [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 8:47 PM
>To: Duane Nickull; Matt MacKenzie; MATHEWS, Tim; Sally St. Amand;
>
>Cc:
>Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>
>Duane,
>
>Thanks for the response. Yes I would like to see the PPT. I hope you
>do not mind if I add few more thoughts related to services and
>business processes:
>
>Services participate in a business process to add some value to it.
>They can be governed and evaluated using business process metrics.
>One service can participate in many business processes and provide
>value to each of them according to the context within that process.
>As far as SOA is concerned it is as important to know what the
>service does, how it can be discovered, contacted, invoked,
>executed, etc. as it is to be able to use it within the process
>context, measure it and assess its value from the business process
>requirements point of view. SOA needs to avoid typical new
>technology chicken and egg syndrome, e.g. companies not producing
>services because there are no service friendly process definitions
>to use them and not having SOA friendly process definitions because
>there are no services to use. Services do not have to know if they
>will be involved in the process upfront, they will be contacted on
>demand according to the process script that is in effect, and they
>will be contacted, checked if available, passed the arguments,
>collected the response and according to their procedure left alone
>to wait for another call. The process execution engine however needs
>to invoke the service according to both service specific information
>and the process specific information.
>
>Having just the service specific information in a model covers only
>one part of the picture and I think it is fine as long as that model
>is a pure service model. However I find it difficult to understand
>that the SOA RM TC model is a SOA reference model when it does not
>include other concepts of SOA. Unfortunately it seems that we cannot
>get to the point where we could agree on a minimal set of supported
>SOA concepts by a model to be the SOA RM. We do not have to and I
>do not want to argue with you or anybody else in SOA RM TC. I am
>just trying to see how our works can fit together in a most
>efficient way. We obviously need more time to better understand each
>others thoughts and ideas and I strongly believe that a constructive
>respectable discussion is helpful for everybody.
>
>By the way, do you know what I am supposed to do to get my messages
>to the SOA RM list. In spite of that I am the SOA RM TC observer I
>get a faliure notice whenever I send a note to the SOA RM.
>
>Goran
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:>Duane Nickull
>To: <mailto:>Matt MacKenzie ;
><mailto:> ;
><mailto:>MATHEWS, Tim ;
><mailto:>Sally St. Amand ;
><mailto:>
>Cc: <mailto:>
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 5:02 PM
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>
>Goran:
>
>The service layer enables the process layer over top of it, however
>during runtime, services do not know if they are part of a process
>or being called individually (it would generally be a bad idea to
>try to maintain the overall state of a process within each service,
>although it could be done). For maximum repurposing of services, it
>would be better to have the service as a simple slave to the
>processes that may use it.
>
>Accordingly, we made a decision that BPM, Orchestration,
>choreography is not a core part of the RM for SOA. We generally
>seem to agree that many SOA implementations will include a layer of
>BPM over top. We are only addressing the SOA model, not the model
>for the underlying or overarching layers.
>
>I have a PPT that explains this in more detail if you are interested.
>
>Duane
>
>*******************************
>Adobe Systems, Inc. - <http://www.adobe.com/>http://www.adobe.com
>Vice Chair - UN/CEFACT http://www.uncefact.org/
>Chair - OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee
>Personal Blog -
><http://technoracle.blogspot.com/>http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
>*******************************
>
>From: Matt MacKenzie [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 12:51 PM
>To: ; MATHEWS, Tim; Sally St. Amand;
>
>Cc:
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>
>Process orientation is only one of multiple potential integration
>with service oriented architecture. SOA-RM is laying the foundation
>for durable architecture based on the core concept of service
>orientation. We recognize that process oriented architecture is a
>natural fit with service orientation...but so are things like event
>orientation.
>
>-matt
>
>From: [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 3:36 PM
>To: MATHEWS, Tim; Matt MacKenzie; Sally St. Amand;
>Cc:
>Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
>
>I think that SOA RM has done good job documenting well-known service
>related concepts and defining some new ones.
>
>I do not see other details besides service and service-related
>concept definitions in the current SOA RM committee draft right now.
>I look forward to seeing the completion of the model you are working
>on with the bottom-up approach.
>Business, business processes and collaboration aspects of business
>are important to address in the model what is not the case with the
>current content of the SOA RM committee draft. By a business process
>I mean a generic business process entity which has common components
>(activities, decisions, etc) and relationships between them that can
>be used to model a business process in any environment regardless of
>what business we support and technology we use. I agree with Sally
>that a link between business processes and services should be one of
>key requirements any SOA reference model should try to meet.
>
>I am not sure what SOA with services brings to business when the
>link between the business processes and services and overall
>business process semantics in the SOA context are not considered to
>be important aspects in a SOA-based reference model.
>
>Goran
>-----Original Message-----
>From: MATHEWS, Tim [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 5, 2005 12:34 PM
>To: 'Matt MacKenzie', 'Sally St. Amand',
>Cc:
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for
>Better "Componentization"
>Matt - I am not sure what point you are trying to make by this? I
>agree with your premise of a bottom up effort, as this was one of
>the operating assumptions that was made from the beginning.
>
>But, I am confident it is the business environment that is
>independent from the reference model.
>
>TM
>
>From: Matt MacKenzie [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 11:58 AM
>To: Sally St. Amand;
>Cc:
>Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for
>Better "Componentization"
>Sally,
>
>A reference model actually needs to be a bottom up effort. We leave
>the ever so popular ?top-down? approach to folks like ebSOA J
>
>We?re creating a vocabulary and general understanding of what I hope
>we can call a discipline of computer science in the future. This
>means, we need a durable reference model that is not dependent on
>the current business environment.
>
>-matt
>
>From: Sally St. Amand [ mailto:]
>Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 10:19 AM
>To:
>Cc:
>Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for
>Better "Componentization"
>
>Frank
>
>This is in response to your request on last week?s conference call,
>if anyone has comments speak now. I also think that the recent
>comments on clarifying sections are a reflection of my issues with
>the specification.
>
>I agree with the majority of points made/described in ver 10. My
>issues are with what is not in this draft. Based on Fig 1 the Refe!
>rence Model is guided by Reference Architectures, Concrete
>Architectures, Profile & Related Models. They in turn account for
>requirements, motivation & goals. This is creating a Reference Model
>from the bottom up. I believe a Reference Model should reflect a top
>down approach.
>
>The Reference Model needs to reflect the environment, the strategy
>and the priorities of the business/mission/collaboration. This will
>impact the construction of services. A service is a business task or
>activity that is realized through technology. The draft does a good
>job of describing how that realization happens. But it doesn?t
>provide a sufficient link between processes and services. The draft
>makes the point that the central focus of! SOA is the task of
>business function?getting something done. A business process is made
>up of tasks and activities to achieve a goal (getting something
>done). The concept of creating the service from the tasks and
>activities in a process is important. For example, where on the
>continuum of fine grained to coarse grained should a particular
>service be; this will affect interaction, reusability. The
>relationship between processes and services needs to be in the
>Reference Model.
>
>While I saw that there is a note saying the glossary is still in
>flux, since one of the objective of the Reference Model is a
>vocabulary, having less in the glossary might be a better option. Is
>semantic integration a guiding principle of SOA?
>
>With respect to conformance there needs to be business results. That
>is an SOA should provide demonstrable mission accomplishments, e.g.
>ROI, match a competitors distribution channel. SOA is not a
>technology. Conformance should provide operational accomplishments,
>these should be measurable.
>
>Sally
>
>
>!
>
>
>
>
>--
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> / Ken Laskey
>\
> | MITRE Corporation, M/S H305 phone: 703-983-7934 |
> | 7515 Colshire Drive fax: 703-983-1379 |
> \ McLean VA 22102-7508 /
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>--
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> / Ken Laskey
>\
> | MITRE Corporation, M/S H305 phone: 703-983-7934 |
> | 7515 Colshire Drive fax: 703-983-1379 |
> \ McLean VA 22102-7508 /
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Rex Brooks
President, CEO
Starbourne Communications Design
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison
Berkeley, CA 94702
Tel: 510-849-2309
