Minutes of SWSA Telecon of 29 April 03 Prepared by Massimo Paolucci From: Massimo Paolucci Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:39:48 -0400 Participants: Christoph Bussler, Mark Burstein, Mike Dean, Massimo Paolucci, Stuart Williams Summary Notes Mark: there is a new pages for SWSA group at www.daml.org/services/swsa/ Mark pointed out that we need to come up with mission statement which summarizes our objectives and contribution on Web Services Architecture Working Group at W3C. Consider the WSA draft definition of web service: "A Web Service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by internet protocols." Possible contributions: What do we replace XML with OWL in the WSA definition? Do we want to go beyond client server? Should we introduce P2P protocols? Enterprise integration problem suggests the need of multiple protocols - should we restrict to the Internet? Especially, should we go beyond web based protocols? Chris pointed out that pragmatically everybody uses HTTP and we need to live with it Mike suggested that the use of XML in WSA is required by its charter http://www.w3.org/2002/01/ws-arch-charter Chris criticized WSA definition of Web service as "software system", since Web services are an interface that bring data to a software system Stuart noticed that we should add the consequences of doing something and running the WS. We should add it. This may be our added value. We should be able to specify the commitments that are made by doing some operation Mark attempted a definition of Semantic Web service: A semantic web service has a description in a Semantic web language of the capabilities of the service and the service is a software mediated function. Should we always specify explicitly the effects of a service? If I have a taxonomy of commodity selling services, and I able to represent in a semantic hierarchy all the different commodities I may have a concept of purchase that has the effect of utilizing one of these services, how much detail should I specify to make use of those services? Chris: Semantics provide three contributions: 1. in simple shopping sites such as e-bay that mimics a real shops, the details may be different but all the check out lines and shopping carts are semantically equivalent. If we have a way to describe to describe them semantically then we do not have to interface them by hand. 2. Buying a house is a very complex process, we should be able to hide such complexity 3. Commitments (and their fulfillment) should be specified Action Items Chris will try to give first stub to Semantic Web service definition Massimo & Stuart start working on B2C scenarios starting from the Web service published by Amazon.com