Michael,
Once I send the message, I was anticipating something like this.
Lets agree, that there may be 2 types of contracts – technical service
contract (has nothing to do with WS and/or WSDL), that is the ne that I am
referring too and which is common usage of service contract term and legal
contract on the service usage, the one that you are referring too. Both are
important, but the reference has to be explicitly qualified, so that the reader
is not confused.
When it reads service contract, no one (me included) has any
idea what it refers too.
Boris, your interpretation of service contract seems to me regards
Web Services or related definition of 'interface contract'. To my knowledge,
RAF defines two things: Service Description - public announcement of the
service abilities and related constraints - and Service Contract - an agreement
between the service provider and one or several consumers about what service
abilities, related communication means and constraints may be used by the this
(or these) consumers. Thus, the service provider knows exactly who uses its
service and what obligations in each case the service provider has to provide
for.
"The way consumer uses
this contract might be specific for a given consumer. " Any consumer may use Service Contract or service in any way
consumer wants. However, upon signing the Service Contract, the consumer may
enter into legal relationship with the service provider. That is, 'doing
anything with contract' is still under the legal constraints. If you meant that
the consumer may use _service_ in the way "specific for a given consumer", then I do agree with you - Ken and me are writing
related recommendations on the tests that the consumer might need to perform in
such case because this use of the service may be in different EC that the
service was guaranteed by the service provider.
Regarding "Creating
a service contract for a group of consumers does not seem to be practical... and
might not be aware which consumers are going to use it"
Indeed, the service does not know and does not need to know who uses it.
However, the service provider is interested in this matter very much. If the
service provider requires Service Contracts, this means that it is not obliged
to provide service to any requests sent to the public service interfaces from
those who had not signed the contracts. At the same time, there are may
examples where Service Description may serve as a default service contract,
e.g. for security services - all must use them under their conditions and there
is nothing to agree on. Another example, in some geographical areas or in
communities of consumers defined based on other criteria, certain services may
be available in only one version for all, i.e. all consumers in one will have
the Service Contract that may differ from the Service Contract for the same
service available in another area (e.g., economical sanctions).
What confuses me in all these definitions is mentioning of
multiple participants.
A service contract is defined by service provider and specifies
service’s characteristics and usage/invocation policies.
The way consumer uses this contract might be specific for
a given consumer. Creating a service contract for a group of consumers does not
seem to be practical. Remember a service is created not for a specific
consumer(s), but rather to produce a certain RWE and might not be aware which
consumers are going to use it.
Here is an alternative definition of the service contract (I think
that trying to define a general term we compromise our goal - service contract.
I refer to the Service Contract because we do not mention any other contracts
in the document):
1072 A contract represents an agreement made by two or
more participants
1073 (the contracting parties) on a set of announced service
characteristics and to be used policies applied to this service interactions.
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