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

[Jon MacLaren]

If I can make my point clearer, I'm not saying that human negotiation 
should be part of WS-Agreement.  But, the Agreement information has to 
remain available as long as it is needed by either party.  This is hard 
to do when the Agreement is a WS-RF style resource (or a service).

You proposed that you could allow some way for the initiator to 
"capture the status" from the Agreement interface.  That'd be alright, 
provided that it was in some form which was signed by the other party.  
Otherwise, it's not much use - too easy to fake up.  (Of course, the 
user still has to trust the agreement provider to give them this after 
things have gone wrong.)

Just saying that shutting down the interface only moves the data to an 
audit/accounting system is all very well, but it gives me no idea of 
how I might retrieve that information, let alone in a standard way.

However, if the definitive form of the Agreement were an XML document, 
signed by both parties, you wouldn't have these problems.  People would 
just keep the agreement document until they felt they no longer needed 
it.  You could still use something like the current Agreement interface 
for doing all the monitoring stuff.  (The lifetime issues for that 
resource would be simpler.)

I also believe, and always have, that having an agreement represented 
primarily as a document is a far more intuitive approach.  I think that 
the advantages of this representation should be fully considered now.

Jon.


On Mar 22, 2005, at 8:16 PM, Karl Czajkowski wrote:

> 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
>