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Subject: Working Group call 20040810
Participants in this morning's working group call agreed to examine the various approaches to modeling relationships in the context of specific use cases for containment and reference relationships. Attendees: - Rami Elron (BMC) - Gearard Woods (IBM) - Jeff Bohren (Open Networks) - Gary Cole (Sun) Mr. Bohren emphasized the importance of discussing containment and reference relationships separately. Mr. Bohren suggested that: - The uses cases for containment and reference differ significantly. - Containment of an object affects the object's identity more fundamentally than the references of an object, - Modeling containment relationships should be simpler and less contentious than modeling reference relationships - Discussing both containment and reference at the same time tends to confuse participants. - If SPML 2.0 were able to model only one of the two, he would prefer that it model containment relationships. Mr. Elron agreed that reference relationships were likely to be more problematic, but suggested this as a reason to tackle them first. The group disagreed, deciding to tackle containment first. Mr. Woods suggested that containment relationships could be modeled without special protocol operations (for example, by adding a 'parent' attribute to the schema). He said that he would try to produce an informal document before the next conference call. Mr. Elron proposed modeling containment as a special form of reference. Mr. Cole was concerned that this would require additional complexity (e.g., meta-data to define cardinality for reference relationships) that would not be needed if containment were modeled separately. Mr. Bohren repeated his belief that the use cases for containment and reference were different enough that they should not be combined. Mr. Elron stated his concern that interoperability would suffer if SPML 2.0 did not model relationships. Without relationships, interoperability would once again depend on standard schema. Mr. Cole agreed, saying that the goal must be to model relationships in a way that is clear, functional and practical so that committee members will include it in the specification. Mr. Bohren pointed out that providers will implement optional interfaces --such as containment and reference--only if they see a functional benefit that outweighs the cost of implementation. Action Items: ------------- 1) Gerry Woods will write a document describing his ideas on modeling containment using schema. gpc
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