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Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?


Joe,

I think what was decided was that a detailed discussion of orchestration was beyond the scope of the RM but we didn't necessarily ban the term.  I expect the fact that services can call other services will have some mention but not a discussion of how it would be done.

Ken

At 12:57 PM 9/6/2005, Chiusano Joseph wrote:
John,
 
I believe this was determined several months ago (I say that in a helpful way, not in a criticizing way). I don't believe we are limited at all in our capability to define service. It's just that we need to define certain "basic" aspects first, and have other TCs (or perhaps this one in a later phase) extend our RM to include capabilities such as orchestration. We've sometimes referred to this as a POA (Process-Oriented Architecture).
 
Hang in there, we'll get there.....
 
Joe
 
Joseph Chiusano
Booz Allen Hamilton
O: 703-902-6923
C: 202-251-0731
Visit us online@ http://www.boozallen.com
 


From: John Harby [ mailto:jharby@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:44 PM
To: soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?

I'm surprised that orchestration is out of scope. I could understand how specifics such as BPEL
would be out of scope but many people will call things services that are lorchestrations of other
services. If orchestration is out of scope then are we limited in our capability to define "service"?

On 9/6/05, Chiusano Joseph < chiusano_joseph@bah.com> wrote:
Emphasizing that orchestration is out of scope for our RM (it's for another RM that can be built on top of ours), and speaking only of Web Services: I would say that all Web Services are orchestrable, but not all Web Services are "orchestration-ready". That is, in order to be "orchestration-ready" a Web Service may need to have the ability to participate in a certain protocol (e.g. the OASIS WS-CAF coordination protocol, which can be part of orchestration) by implementing that protocol.
 
For example, a Web Service may need to have the capability to register itself with a coordinator service.
 
Joe
 
Joseph Chiusano
Booz Allen Hamilton
O: 703-902-6923
C: 202-251-0731
Visit us online@ http://www.boozallen.com
 


From: John Harby [ mailto:jharby@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:03 PM
To: soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org

Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?

One question I had was can all services be orchestrated or are there "orchestratable services" and "non-orchestratable services". If there is a distinction, would this orchestration capability be mitigated via policy?

John Harby

On 9/6/05, Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org> wrote:
The actual collection (orchestration?) of services (or more basically, capabilities that the services access?) will reflect the particular business process, but at a reference model level we can't build a different model for each business process.  The challenge is to identify the concepts from which you can support any business process.  (Question: have the previous drafts of SOA-RM missed any of these concepts?)  A previous difficulty when looking at typical use cases is that not every SOA challenge will have a purchase order and a credit card number.  While purchasing is an important use case, a SOA tailored to support the variations of purchasing may fail badly in addressing, say, the need to find and access real time disaster data.

Ken

At 11:23 AM 9/6/2005, marchadr@wellsfargo.com wrote:
I tend to agree with Steve's point about having the model reflect the business processes and then deriving the service definition from the type of processes the service will aggregate or use. In theory, the payment of a product, service or donation is not that different since at the end of the day it becomes a transaction of a total amount from one account to the other (Amazon's in this case) and the entities (product, service, or donation) are a means to an end.
 
The separation of the order versus the purchasing would probably be the best approach for the interface design, since the order could vary and have polymorphistic behavior depending on the type of entities that are a part of the order. (In some cases, the order would have a possibility of having a donation and a product in the same order from the UI point of view.)  The order would be used to hold products and start the back office processing, while the purchase would make the transaction of money based on a total amount of the order.
 
This brings up an issue in some ways of whether or not the order triggers the purchase which would result in a service invoking another service.
The other issue I have been finding is a return is similar to a purchase since it is the reverse of the transaction (one account to another with an amount), since usually it is to late to reverse it before it actual makes a charge. Also in the case of purchasing large amounts of products and paying for them and in some back office process one product is determined to be discontinued then the reversal of a transaction will really be based on the amount of that discontinued transaction and not the total amount which would almost be like purchasing the product back from the customer.
 
Something to think about. The context seems to be a good approach for the ordering and purchasing scenario.
 
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: Jones, Steve G [ mailto:steve.g.jones@capgemini.com]
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 7:30 AM
To: Ken Laskey; SOA-RM
Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?

I've found that the only way to model this is to ensure that you have a hierarchy of service that models the full business rather than concentrating on the technical delivery elements.   So you must model (but not have to directly implement) the two types of services, which then act as containers for the technical services.  The higher order service then has different business processes that give different results, but these are hidden from the service consumers.
 
What has been the biggest problem for me has been how to represent the change in contract (but not interface) of a service due to its different domain.  This isn't a huge technical challenge at the moment (as we can't define contracts at all!) but could become a much bigger challenge is future.  Some concept of contract inheritance might work here…
 
I'm wary of describing groups as things (like a payment service) as a capability rather than a service as it gets tricky on granularity, unless you mean that a capability is a single invocation on a service?
 
If we deal in RM around Service boundaries and the concept of hierarchy then we don't have a new service just a different context.  Where it gets tricky for me is when you have a service that IS clearly re-used but is actually completely separate.  You get this in some compliance sensitive areas where they use identical solutions but completely separate instances.  This is different to ones where they do that just because they can, there is a broader context that means they MUST be kept separate… a real bugger to model.
 
In part I'm interested in how we are putting hierarchy into the RM?
 
Steve
 


From: Ken Laskey [ mailto:klaskey@mitre.org]
Sent: 05 September 2005 15:12
To: SOA-RM
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?


 
Steve,

 
I believe we are saying the same thing.  If the service is specifying the item to be purchased by UPC, it is the same service in a different context.  In this case, the donation would be added to the general catalog and the user interaction would be the same.  I'd consider the "broader service" to be what I call the underlying capability, i.e. the money collection in return for something.  The consumer sees the real world effect of that capability existing and there being a service to access it, but never sees the capability itself. 

 
However, note that with both Amazon and Apple there are new means to invoke the service (special links) and the service interacts with the consumer in ways different than the usual.  For these reasons I'd say that for the new context Amazon and Apple created new services (where here I mean services in the SOA context) to repurpose existing capability (the provisioning of which may be called a service in the more general business context).  I'm not sure what Amazon and Apple did made use of any SOA magic but it was nice reuse of capability.

 
Does this bugger things up?  I think it does only if we need to be definitive when you cross the line from reusing a service to having a new one.  I'm not sure for the SOA-RM that we need to draw that line or even acknowledge that it may exist.

 
Ken

 

 
On Sep 5, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Jones, Steve G wrote:


Again not to raise old threads… but

 
This for me is the concept of context, the context has changed which means the impact of the service is different, its implementation and execution may however remain identical.  So the "Collection" service in this case always results in Money being taken and added to a general leger with a UPC for the product code (for example).  The difference is that in the charity domain it results in the further sending of that money onto the charity represented by the UPC, whereas in the purchasing domain you get a song to download.  The actual collection service therefore remains unchanged but there is a broader service (whose interface you don't directly see but assume) which controls the whole process.

 
And I can safely say that these things can be a bugger to model.

 


From: Ken Laskey [mailto:klaskey@mitre.org]
Sent: 05 September 2005 01:29
To: SOA-RM
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?

 
And the answer, as always, is it depends.  In my example of buying by UPC symbol, it is the same but possibly because the use of the UPC symbol has been expanded.  In the case of having a new service that, let's say, automatically substitutes the charity item number for your choice of a song item number and maybe gives specialized feedback to the consumer saying thank you for responding to the hurricane emergency, I'd say it is a different service. It is derived from the original but I'd say it is different.

 
Ken

 
P.S. and with this busy hurricane season, we are up to Katrina.

 
P.P.S.  Another interesting aspect is if you had a computer that hadn't already accepted the iTunes terms and conditions, you were first presented with their click-through agreement before you contribute.  So we also have an interesting reuse of policy and the need to form a contract.

 

 
On Sep 4, 2005, at 7:14 PM, Chiusano Joseph wrote:

 
<Quote>
Is there also a concept of a service having the same interface but by operating in a different domain (e.g. charity) it acts different for the same interface?
</Quote>

 
Which raises another question we've been through before in the TC (several months ago): Is it the same service in both cases? That is, are the "normal" Amazon.com order placement service (with credit card info on file, and selectable each time) and this new "hurricane donation" service really the same service?

 
Joe

 
P.S. Not trying to resurrect a permathread - just tying a recent observation in with a past exchange, to see it in a new light.


From: Jones, Steve G [ mailto:steve.g.jones@capgemini.com]
Sent: Sun 9/4/2005 5:25 PM
To: Ken Laskey; Chiusano Joseph
Cc: SOA-RM
Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?
Is there also a concept of a service having the same interface but by operating in a different domain (e.g. charity) it acts different for the same interface?  In effect its business contract is changed by a business driver outside of its scope, while its functionality (collecting money) remains the same its imperative is changed by the wider business context in which it now sits.

 
Steve


From: Ken Laskey [mailto:klaskey@mitre.org]
Sent: 04 September 2005 21:22
To: Chiusano Joseph
Cc: SOA-RM
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Amazon.com and Hurricane Catrina - Service Context? Service "Veneer"?

 
Apple also did this with their iTunes Music Store: click the link and you order a donation instead of a song.

 
This is why I keep insisting on differentiating between the service and the capability.  The underlying capability is to collect money for a purpose.  The service provides the interface for doing that.  Typically, you invoke the capability through a service that enables you to buy a book (or a song) but a new service invokes that capability (with a new user facing interface for Apple; I haven't checked Amazon) to "buy" a donation.  The power is the capability is reusable by making it accessible through a different service.

 
Now note if I buy something through a service that allowed me to specify the UPC code, I could buy a donation through their existing service with that UPC, i.e. reusing the service for a purpose similar to but different from its original purpose.  In fact, several supermarkets around here do support that because they have little tear-off tablets at the checkout for certain hunger organizations and you can hand the clerk a page for $1, $5, or $10.

 
Many interesting variations and our RM just has to capture the concepts that can describe any of them.  I think I'll mow the lawn and think about this some more.

 
Ken

 
On Sep 4, 2005, at 4:06 PM, Chiusano Joseph wrote:

 
One thing that I discovered regarding the horrible catastrophe in the Southern US is that Amazon.com enabled people to use its online ordering service to make a donation. One could use the credit card information that Amazon.com already had online to make a donation in what it called "1-Click Donation" (or something similar).
So instead of placing an order for a book, CD, etc., your "order" was your donation, and you could view your "order" online, which (as I recall) would show the amount that you donated.

 
Something that came to my mind is: What would this placing of a "new face" on a existing service be called? Is it a different context for the ordering service? (i.e. in the context of Hurrican Katrina) Is it a "veneer" that was placed on top of the existing service? None of the above?

 
Joe

 
Joseph Chiusano
Booz Allen Hamilton
O: 703-902-6923
C: 202-251-0731
Visit us online@ http://www.boozallen.com

 

 
---
Ken Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305     phone:  703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive                        fax:        703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508

 

 

 
This message contains information that may be privileged or confidential and is the property of the Capgemini Group. It is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy, disseminate, distribute, or use this message or any part thereof. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.



 

 
---
Ken Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305     phone:  703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive                        fax:        703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508

 

 

 
This message contains information that may be privileged or confidential and is the property of the Capgemini Group. It is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy, disseminate, distribute, or use this message or any part thereof. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.




 
---
Ken Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305     phone:  703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive                        fax:        703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508



 

 
This message contains information that may be privileged or confidential and is the property of the Capgemini Group. It is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy, disseminate, distribute, or use this message or any part thereof. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.

--
     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  /   Ken Laskey                                                                \
 |    MITRE Corporation, M/S H305    phone:  703-983-7934   |
 |    7515 Colshire Drive                    fax:      703-983-1379   |
  \   McLean VA 22102-7508                                              /
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


--
     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  /   Ken Laskey                                                                \
 |    MITRE Corporation, M/S H305    phone:  703-983-7934   |
 |    7515 Colshire Drive                    fax:      703-983-1379   |
  \   McLean VA 22102-7508                                              /
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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