[graap-wg] proposal: agreement lifecycle end-games

[Karl Czajkowski]

I agree the lifetime management is hard. :-) I wonder if this sort of
scenario is not a good point in time for the client/initiator to:

  1) Use the Agreement interface to capture the status and/or other
     identifying information.

  2) "Retire" the Agreement by allowing it to be destroyed.

  3) Have offline compensation using the captured status and
     identifying information.

As I have said before, I think there is a practical limit to what can
be done in the online, automatic system view of WS-Agreement.
Shutting down/destroying those interfaces should not necessarily
destroy records but just shift the information out of the online
message processing system and into audit/accounting.

Trying to negotiate compensation between humans is definitely out of
scope (and too hard) for WS-Agreement, I would say.  I guess I would
frame the question as what sort of support is needed to allow such
conversations to continue after the Agreement is terminated,
e.g. access to "final state" and/or naming information that can be
passed around offline?

karl


On Mar 22, Jon MacLaren loaded a tape reading:
...
> It may be OK to "garbage collect" the agreement after all the terms 
> have successfully completed.  But where one or more terms have been 
> violated, the initiator will want to be able to point at the agreement 
> for an arbitrary length of time afterwards.  They may wish to seek 
> compensation through some out-of-bands methods.
> 
> Let me give a motivating use-case.
> 
> Lets say that something goes wrong with the execution of my job.  
> Perhaps we'd agreed that it would execute at 4pm, but it didn't start 
> until 4.30pm.  I am offered a partial refund, but want to argue for 
> more.  I'll do this by email, but will want to refer to the agreement 
> in some way...
> 
> Lifetime management for this sort of thing is hard.
> 
> >
> >karl
> >
> 
> Jon.

-- 
Karl Czajkowski
karlcz at univa.com