Goran,
Please keep in mind that you are working in
an open process where people (like myself) provide feedback on submitted
content, even if they have not read the entire document. Anyone in this process
has the right to comment on any part of materials submitted before reading them
in their entirety. I simply looked at a figure that was labeled to be a
"high-level information model" for SOA, and noted the absence of what I believe
(especially based on the work that is being done in the SOA-RM TC) is a
fundamental piece. I am not required by OASIS policy to continue reading the
entire document at that point before I provide feedback on my observation to a
TC.
I suggest that if you cannot donate
something to OASIS and then abide by OASIS rules in evolving your donation, that
you rescind it - and immediately.
Joe
From: Goran Zugic
[mailto:goran.zugic@semantion.com] Sent: Sat 10/29/2005 8:09
PM To: Chiusano Joseph; ebSOA OASIS TC Subject: Re: [ebsoa]
SOA Collaboration Semantics
Joe,
This is how I view professionalism in this kind of
communication:
1. Do not criticize the content until you have not fully read
it.
2. When you criticize something always state your
standpoint. Do not come up with a negative critique before you explain your position and have fully
understood the other side's position.
In order to achieve this, step one is a prerequisite. As you know, our solution is explained in three publicly
available documents. You said you will
clarify your viewpoints, I am looking
forward to seeing them whenever they are ready.
3. Whenever you ask for an answer, or try to
find an answer with the help of others, be patient with
the discussions until all positions are clear. Do not rush with
critiques such as: "... I am still highly skeptical of their
usefulness and value..." or "... I frankly don't see its value to this TC or
standards work in general..." or "...it appears to me that the SOA IM was
originally written as a process IM, and some text regarding "service" was added
in as an afterthought ...". Arbitrary critiques are not hard to produce, in
comparison to years of hard work and years of professional
experience; both of which were needed to produce the specification
framework that the ebSOA TC is working on right now.
When I joined the ebSOA TC back in March of this year, the only
ebSOA TC architectural specification document (dated August 2004) that
was present, was a high level abstract draft that you also contributed to.
You left this in its beginning stage, and I have not seen any further
contributions since. Coneveniently you reappeared as soon as the FERA-based
SOA submission was completed, and your intentions were questionable at
best. What I want to know, is wether you would like to help the process, or
hindered it like you have been doing thus
far.
The way I see this, is that I will not waste my time with
the chicken and egg scenario with endless
discussions about SOA, services, service orchestration, choreography, and many others. However, we
can further our discussions, as long as
constructive exchanges based on our clearly stated positions, and most importantly, the
respect for each others work are present.
Counter-productive arguements without
merit, which you have displayed, serve as a barrier to our communication.
Assuming that we will have more positive and more
constructive communication in the near
future, I look forward to hearing from you about your position, views and outlooks, on SOA and all
aspects surrounding it.
Goran
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 5:02
PM
Subject: RE: [ebsoa] SOA Collaboration
Semantics
Goran,
I don't believe it is very professional for you to assume what I am
interested in regarding SOA. In fact, your assumption was quite
innaccurate.
I will clarify that I am interested in the terminology, the purpose,
the business process improvements it can provide, and many other
aspects.
I thank you in
advance for updating your high-level information model to accurately reflect
your stated intent for these specifications. I am still highly skeptical of
their usefulness and value, but time and market will tell.
Joe
Kind Regards,
Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz Allen Hamilton
700 13th St. NW
Washington, DC 20005
O: 202-508-6514
C: 202-251-0731
Joe,
Thank you for being so frank in
sharing your opinion. Looks like you are interested in terminology of the
SOA, not in the purpose of it, or in the business process improvements that
it can provide. The proposed framework deals with ontology, information
models, run time architecture and semantics for SOA and its implementations,
the missing glue areas in current standard specifications. When you read the
proposed documents in more details, you will get answers to all your
questions. Fore example, Service entity is explicitly defined
in SOA IM. Unfortunately your conclusions have been made mostly based on the
only figure in the SOA IM document, "Figure 1 - SOA Information Model (High
Level)", yes it says "High Level", which does not graphically include
Service entity. If you really read the document you would easily find out
that the Service entity is defined in SOA IM and that it is one of the the
core SOA IM entities used to support key business process entities:
activities, decisions and events. However, in our next release, we will
graphically add, for example, the Service entity to the SOA IM high-level
figure to help you and similar readers whose focus is on the pictures not
the content to better understand our specs and solution. Few
more words about reference and run-time architecture. As I mentioned in my
previous note FERA reference architecture has been created based on many
collaborative (business) process use cases and installations. The run-time
SOA is based on it and SOA Collaboration Semantics defines all its
architectural components' protocols, interfaces and methods. That is how you
provide vendors with specs that can be used to develop plugable
architectural components in a fully interoperable way. How you are going to
implement it, what technology will be used and everything else that comes
with it is completely independent of this specs. Analogy with
sports. The formalism applied to the abstract definition of the ball
(service) out of the game (context) does not make too much
sense. We can debate if the ball should be defined as "soccer ball" or
"football" forever, and no-one would win that debate. It does not matter if
we follow the ontology of the game. Players will say "pass me the ball", or
"share that orange, you hog", and everyone else will understand that request
given the game being played at the moment. Smart people defined the
purpose of services and SOA long time ago but nobody has provided the way
how the entire SOA should work. We are the first group that has created the
framework for this kind of the SOA specs. More and more people and
organizations and even some new OASIS TCs starting to realize the importance
of the SOA IM and SOA semantics which are first introduced by us as the key
elements for the complete support for business process modeling,
deployment and execution in SOA.
Goran
-----Original Message----- From: Chiusano
Joseph [mailto:chiusano_joseph@bah.com] Sent: Wednesday, October
26, 2005 11:04 AM To: 'Goran Zugic', 'ebSOA OASIS
TC' Subject: RE: [ebsoa] SOA Collaboration
Semantics
Please see comments below, marked with
[JMC].
Kind Regards,
Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz Allen Hamilton
700 13th St. NW
Washington, DC 20005
O: 202-508-6514
C: 202-251-0731
Joe,
Thanks for your feedback. These are my
answers:
- The run-time architecture is based on analysis of
over 130 collaborative installations. It is based on FERA which
classifies and categorizes capabilities required to support all of the
use cases analyzed. The components are actually reference functional
modules that have specified functions and interfaces. Our run time
SOA is based on that model and each component has a well defined role
and interface to communicate with other components to support the
collaborative process.
[JMC] Thank you. The information you
provided above is valuable to understand the background and
history of the run-time architecture. I should also emphasize that
my original question was: "Since the run-time architecture
is greatly concrete, is it intended that products be based on it? Is it
intended for exemplary purposes? Other? ".
- SOA IM is based on the process definition in FERA that requires
certain level of specificity of the process detail. True, FERA does not
require QoS details, but it provides a robust security policy
model.
[JMC] It seems to me that
if the security policy model is robust as you say, it would be reflected
in the SOA IM hierarchy shown in Figure 1 of the SOA IM document. Why
would it not be (sorry, I don't
understand).
The
IM is derived from FERA process characteristics and there are
additional data elements required for the run time semantics that are
used for quality, escalation, monitoring and other administrative
aspects of run time execution. The SOA IM contains sufficient level of
detail to extract the semantics and to execute it over the run time SOA.
True it is a process based model, and that is intentional,
because that maintains the fidelity of business requirements
throughout the entire deployment. In this framework, it is less
important to define what is a service then to satisfy all
basic principles of SOA.
[JMC] How can one "satisfy
all basic principles of SOA" if the most fundamental concept of SOA -
"service" - is not
defined?
That is why it is an SOA IM.
[JMC] Given that "Service"
does not appear in the IM hierarchy, I would asser that it is *not* a
SOA IM, and that portraying it as such is - a best - a huge
stretch.
However, the Service entity
is defined in Section 2.1.35 in SOA IM document.
[JMC] Great - why not put
it in the IM hierarchy?
Hence, you see activities, decisions,
events, roles, rules and metrics as key entities. A service can
therefore be any activity, or a decision that has defined inputs and
outputs, conditions for its invocation, metrics for its performance,
rules for its execution, matrix with the input processing logic and
few other entities in the model.
[JMC] Great - then that
should be reflected in the IM hierarchy, with "Service" being related to
all of these, IMHO.
Hence the entire model in fact defines
services, their orchestration,
[JMC] Not all SOA instances
involve orchestration - that is a feature (aspect) that is determined
according to business need. So building in orchestration "natively",
IMHO, makes this an orchestration IM (or a process IM), not a SOA
IM.
their business rules
and other aspects required for SOA definition, deployment, maintenance
and continuous operational support. The entire IM and the architecture
is an SOA based on the principles of service orientation.
[JMC] I believe that it
cannot be this, since "Service" is not even included in the IM
hierarchy, much less as a central
focus.
Just like in the
sport of soccer nothing is really called soccer, but everything else
defines the game, players, referees, goals, spectators, ball, pitch,
etc.
[JMC] Yes, but there are
fundamental components you mentioned, such as a soccer ball. How can
this be SOA (soccer) without depicting a soccer ball
(Service)?
I am not implying anything
more than I am saying here, but it appears to me that the SOA IM was
originally written as a process IM, and some text regarding "service"
was added in as an afterthought (just my
opinion).
Given its current state, I
frankly don't see its value to this TC or standards work in
general.
Thanks,
Joe
Regards,
Goran
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005
4:10 PM
Subject: RE: [ebsoa] SOA
Collaboration Semantics
Goran,
Thanks for sending these documents - it's
clear that a great deal of work has gone into
them.
I have a few questions,
please:
Run-Time SOA: I get the notion of a reference
architecture as shown in Figure 1 on p.3. Having said that, I would
expect that any run-time (concrete) architecture that is depicted as
being based on the reference architecture is merely for exemplary
purposes, yet the run-time architecture is simply presented without
any indication of its purpose. Since the run-time architecture is
greatly concrete, is it intended that products be based on it? Is it
intended for exemplary purposes? Other?
SOA Information Model: Though
this is called a "SOA" information model, this document
looks more to me like a "Process
Information Model" that is actually independent of SOA (that is, I did
not see anything that restricted it to SOA). In fact, in order to call something a "SOA"
information model, I would assert that there are several other areas
that would need to be incorporated beyond processes - e.g. security,
policy, QoS, etc. Even considering the process perspective, there is
nothing that I see in this information model that speaks distinctly to
a service-oriented paradigm - in fact, figure 1 (p.24) does not even
have a "Service" concept. What is the intended use of this document
for ebSOA?
Thanks,
Joe
Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz Allen
Hamilton
700 13th St. NW
Washington, DC
20005
O: 202-508-6514
C:
202-251-0731
Hello ebSOA TC,
Semantion is pleased to announce the
completion of its FERA-based SOA contribution to ebSOA TC.
The SOA Collaboration Semantics
document
http://www.semantion.com/specs/soa/SOA_CS_V0.1.doc
contains FERA-based SOA semantics specification that together
with two previously submitted documents, Run-time SOA and
SOA Information Model, represent Semantion's SOA
specification framework.
The new releases of the Run-time SOA document and
the SOA Information Model document are available
at
http://www.semantion.com/specs/soa/SOA_IM_V0.2.doc
http://www.semantion.com/specs/soa/Run-time_SOA_V0.2.doc
These documents should be reviewed in the following
order:
- Run-time SOA
- SOA Information Model
- SOA Collaboration Semantics
Please let me know if you have any questions or need more
information regarding the submitted documents.
Regards,
Goran
Zugic
Chief
Architect
Semantion
Inc.
416-995-7532
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