Minutes of SWSA telecon of 03 June 24
Participants: Mark Burstein, Mike Dean, Carole Goble

Carole joined us for about 40 minutes. 

Mark reviewed our discussion of last week, and we discussed how the notion
of clarification/elaboration dialogs might apply wrt Grid. (see my notes of
last week)

Key points discussed:

In some service processes, and FOR SOME CLASSES OF CLIENTS, additional
information may be required before a service is provided - examples being
things like a membership or other ID that is associated with specific
privledges, or enabling financial transactions with a credit card, or
vendor contract#, etc. When dealing with information services or
matchmakers, query refinement questions might be necessary to reduce the
number of candidate matches. This too is in the class of "answering a
question with a question".

If these sub-dialogs are constant regardless of who the requester is, or
what is requested (as with matchmaker queries), then they can be part of
the process model. But if there are many variants depending on the client
or request, then adding all of this to the process model may be both
combersome, and unnecessary. Better is to enable the process of making a
request to be replied to with a form (which would look alot like a process
description) or a query. Currently neither the SWSL committee nor any of
the commercial WS protocol proposals supports this functionality.  The
question is: do we think it is an important direction we should recommend
for SWS?

In MyGrid, Carole said, they are now very concerned with matchmaking geared
to discovering workflows (analogous to DAML-S process models) as opposed to
just basic services. There is a Workflow execution (she used another word)
engine associated with requesting agents. These read and execute workflow
descriptions stored as files accessible through a registry/matchmaker. She
will provide more details by email. Terry Payne is looking at using DAML-S
to support some of this work.

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By early July (i.e. next week), we must develop a workplan for the next
year's effort. If I can reach Chris (his mailbox is currently full), we
will send around a draft in the next few days, which will be the topic of
discussion at the next telecon, and in email.

Our attendance level has been declining dramatially. I will be polling
people to see whether they are able/intend to participate further, or
whether we need some new members.