RE: [soa-rm] What Is A "Metaservice"?

["Bashioum, Christopher D" <cbashioum@mitre.org>]

Good point.  An architect *may* want to constrain a service as atomic
(say, for performance reasons), may want to architect a meta service
from a set of pre-defined atomic services (thus constraining the
service to be "meta"), or may want to leave it up to the implementor
whether to make a service atomic or "meta".  In such a case, having
such a construct in the RA would be useful.  

    

-----Original Message-----
From: McGregor.Wesley@tbs-sct.gc.ca
[mailto:McGregor.Wesley@tbs-sct.gc.ca] 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 2:45 PM
To: Laskey, Ken; Bashioum, Christopher D
Cc: rexb@starbourne.com; soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [soa-rm] What Is A "Metaservice"?

Ken,

From a minimalist point of view your point is valid and the RM as it
now stands reflects that.

For those who manage large multi-business, multi-jurisdiction,
multi-departmental, multi-lingual enterprises, there may be great value
in having a "meta-service" in order to assist the classification of
services and provide the level of abstraction needed to ease the
building of a common framework.

To out-of-hand dismiss the idea, is, to say the least, self-defeating.

Regards,

Wes

P.S. Be careful of what you call worthless,  what large SOA players are
backing this RM?


 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Ken Laskey [mailto:klaskey@mitre.org] 
Sent:	February 13, 2006 2:23 PM
To:	Bashioum, Christopher D
Cc:	McGregor, Wesley; Rex Brooks; soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject:	Re: [soa-rm] What Is A "Metaservice"?

 From an SOA standpoint, unless it is vital information that would  
somehow be made known through the service description, there is only a

service and we neither know nor care whether it is atomic or meta.

re another comment, I see no reason to generate a worthless definition

just to beat someone else's worthless definition to the punch.

Ken

On Feb 13, 2006, at 11:00 AM, Bashioum, Christopher D wrote:

> I just now read the actual blog, and I think Dave L. is right-on with
> regard to the overall intent of better describing services in a
> consistent way.  In fact, I've been working on such a
meta-description
> for services for the DoD for a number of months now.  My problem is
> with the term.  I made the following post to his blog
>
> <Post>
> Agree with the article, but not the term metaservice.  We are using
the
> term "service definition framework" for the added information used to
> describe the services.
>
> I would submit that most of this additional information should exist
> within the WSDL framework, most of it in the abstract portion.  In
> WSDL-2.0, it would generally be children of the Interface element.
>
> My problem with the term "metaservice" is that it sounds more like a
> type of service (like a stock quote service, or a weather service).
It
> does not communicate what you are looking for.  A better term might
be
> meta-description, or a meta-interface, or something like that
> </Post>
>
> That being said, Joe's original comment to the SOA-RM list about a
> metaservice being a "service about services" would also have another
> name, depending on what it did.  E.g., an aggregation service, an
> orchestration service, etc.  To call it a metaservice doesn't really
> describe what it does.  On the other hand, any service that uses
other
> services may be a "type" or "class" of service that uses other
> services.  In which case a service that is itself an aggregation of
> other 'lower-level' services would be a metaservice.  This might be
> helpful in distinguishing between atomic services and metaservices.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 10:39 AM
> To: McGregor.Wesley@tbs-sct.gc.ca; soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: [soa-rm] What Is A "Metaservice"?
>
> Good point Wes,
>
> Would it make an errata? Just to pre-empt the obvious.
>
> Regards,
> Rex
>
> P.S. What would the equivalent be in a bus or a fabric? Can I build a
> server for it? Does it do Windows?
>
> At 9:57 AM -0500 2/13/06, <McGregor.Wesley@tbs-sct.gc.ca> wrote:
>> Hi Joe,
>>
>> The definition of "meta-service" would be dependent on the context
>> in which it is used IMHO.
>>
>> I would note however that some company will define it soon, publish
>> it, and that definition (even if erroneous) may be THE definition.
>>
>> To simply ignore the inevitable is to put our heads in the sand.
>>
>> A service about services seems logically equivalent to data about
> data.
>>
>> Do we need to say more?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Wes
>
>
> --  
> Rex Brooks
> President, CEO
> Starbourne Communications Design
> GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison
> Berkeley, CA 94702
> Tel: 510-849-2309
>
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Ken Laskey
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