Re: [soa-rm-ra] Service & Capability

[Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>]

Jim,

First, what is meant by Action has been a continuing source of debate, and I'm not sure it's been resolved with respect to section 3.

With that as a caveat, my interpretation is

1. A capability is something that can be brought to bear to address some set of needs.

2. The results of using a capabilities are a set of real world effects that represent an effect on (and ideally a satisfaction of) the needs.

3. SOA services access capabilities and thus by exercising those capabilities, results in certain real world effects.  Note the real world effects of the service may not merely match the real world effects of the service because more things may be going on than accessing a single capability.

4. (This gets touchier.) An action is the application of intent (by a consumer) that somehow has the service do its stuff and producing real world effects.  But when a service receives a message, a Web Services implementation would kick off a WSDL operation, and there is a certain extent to which Action as connected to description and interaction maps to that WSDL operation.  I have no doubt others will further muddy this point.

Ken

On Jan 29, 2009, at 5:40 PM, James Odell wrote:

Hi all,

OK, just one last question for today.

In 4.3.2, Services perform Actions that cause Real World Effects.
In 3.3.1, Services have Capabilities that achieve Real World Effects.

It would seem that there Actions and Capabilities have some close conceptual tie, here.  Are Capabilities defined in terms of the Action(s) they provide?  Or, ...?


-Jim

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Ken Laskey

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