RE: Consumer mechanism for "advertising" for a service

["Peter F Brown" <peter@justbrown.net>]

Wes:
We are back to the problem/issue of intent and context: from the moment an
application/agent establishes an intention to be a service consumer then it
*is* a service consumer (at the very least in its context, even if nothing
out there recognises it as such); in the same way that a service provider
(and indeed a service) is a service provider (or a service) from the moment
there is an intention for it to be so, irrespective of invocation,
execution, etc.

In an RA, I think it's more helpful to think of service consumer as one
concept. The "variants" you propose are then properties of an association
(eg "state=invoked", "state=run-time", etc) between the consumer "concept"
and the actual "real world" implementation (see attached diagram - I'm not
sure what to call these different "aspects" or states of being a consumer
tho'...ideas on a postcard please).

There are practical and powerful reasons for making this conceptual
separation, not least in the area of "semantic web service" implementations.
But I'll leave that stuff until Vancouver....

-Peter

Consumer concept.png