Re: [dss] Profile Integration proposal

[Trevor Perrin <trevp@trevp.net>]

At 11:32 PM 4/9/2004 +0200, Andreas Kuehne wrote:

>>>The alternative would be Andreas's suggestion below to allow the requestor
>>>to indicate both 'wss' and 'pws' in its request and place the burden of
>>>interpretation on the DSS server. We would likely need to define an
>>>corresponding fault message for 'no intersection of profiles'.
>>
>>I don't like the idea of "auto-merging" profiles.  Different profiles 
>>will probably conflict, so if you want to combine them, human 
>>intelligence will be needed to figure out which requirements from each 
>>take precedence, and produce a new profile documenting this.
>I'll expect human intelligence will be needed anyway, especially for 
>implenting the different profiles :-)

Sure, but how can you implement a merged profile when you don't know how to 
resolve its conflicting requirements?

If  profile X say only optional inputs A,B,C are allowed, and profile Y 
says only optional inputs B,C,D are allowed, does the merged profile 
support the union or the intersection?  If the German Sig-Law profile 
requires <Document>, and the time-stamp profile requires <DocumentHash>, 
then which one gives way?  etc...


>My concern is that we try to make a decision that should better be left to 
>the implementor. Let the smart programmers and the bold salesmen decide 
>which combination are relevant.

:-)

I can't quite agree.  But I applaud the sentiment!

[...]
>Another concern of precombining profiles :  If someone discoveres the need 
>for a new combination it will take a complete standardisation cycle to 
>define it, didn't it ? This would hamper the implementor a lot !

People could hammer out a private agreement between themselves.

Anyways, just to be concrete: your proposal is for the client to be able to 
send a list of URIs, denoting the profiles that are in effect.  In 
contrast, I think that specification work is necessary to produce a merged 
profile, so we might as well treat the merged profile like any other, with 
its own URI.

What are other people's thoughts?


Trevor