An epiphany

[Francis McCabe <frankmccabe@mac.com>]

You guys may well not like this, but I believe that I have found a way  
to cut the size of the RA in half....

I am not currently in a 'fully formed' state of this idea; but it goes  
something like this:

There are primarily two perspectives involved in SOA ecosystems: the  
perspective of the code and the perspective of the ecosystem. In the  
former, the principal ideas are semantic engagement and counts-as. In  
the latter, the principal idea is public semantics. (I know that this  
is very cryptic, but it does unfold ...)

On top of this is one further important concept of system cardinality:  
we have been talking explicitly about 1 system (the Enterprise SOA)  
and many systems (the Internet SOA). In fact, this is not fully  
realistic; this structure is itself recursive: we need to be able to  
talk about systems of systems of systems; etc. In effect, we need to  
be able to characterize how systems of systems are put together.

Some implications that I can see are:
  1. no commitment to message exchange.
  2. no explicit commitment to description.
  3. instead is the concept of private action being interpreted as  
public joint action at a particular semantic engagement.
  4. to meet a given need may involve 'tunneling' through multiple  
layers of such interpretation.

If this were to be fully worked out, it would result in something that  
would be better identified as SOA meta-architecture.

It may also be too much.

Noodles of the day :)
Frank

smime.p7s