Relationship to work of W3C Web Services Resource Access Working Group

["Johannes Echterhoff" <johannes.echterhoff@igsi.eu>]

Hi.

I am new to this list, therefore I am going to quickly introduce myself: my
name is Johannes Echterhoff and I am involved in standardization activities
of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC - http://www.opengeospatial.org).

In an OGC working group we identified the need for a general
publish/subscribe approach for geospatial web services. We identified
WS-Notification as a possible solution. WS-Eventing is another candidate,
but I favoure the OASIS specification because it has reached the final
specification status, while WS-Eventing was "only" a W3C submission at the
time when I compared both.

Now I learnt of the activities of a new W3C working group, named "Web
Services Resource Access Working Group". I have some questions that I hope
you can answer:

How are the activities of the W3C working group, especially the resulting
documents / standards related to the work done by OASIS? WS-Eventing appears
to provide a subset of the functionality given by WS-Notification.
Some time ago I read about a common approach to eventing in web service
environments, titled WS-EventNotification. I thought this was a great idea,
having a basic set of functionality which would support basic pub/sub and
optional extensions which provided higher functionality, like topic based
subscriptions or brokering. Unfortunately, according to
http://travisspencer.com/blog/2008/11/effort-to-converge-ws-eventing.html
the efforts to harmonize WS-Eventing and WS-Notification and create a
single, common standard have ceased. Please comment if this is true and if
so why the common approach has been abandoned.


For my work at the OGC, I need guidance which approach (that from W3C or
OASIS) to use and promote. It would help a lot if there was a public
statement to what extent these apparently competing standards differ or
share the same functionality. If possible, guidance why one should use one
approach over the other would be highly appreciated - something like best
practices for various use cases. Right now the only arguments pro/contra an
approach for me are its current specification status
(submission/recommendation/draft/etc.), the functionality required/provided
and the available toolbase.

You see that I am a bit confused with the (apparently emerging) functional
overlap of W3C and OASIS specifications. I hope you can help to clarify the
current situation.

Best regards,
Johannes Echterhoff