[graap-wg] condition expression language requirements for WS-Agreement

[Anne Anderson]

WS-Agreement is supposed to be "a Web Services protocol for establishing
agreement between two parties".  Unless there are defined mechanisms for
reaching agreement on the contents of a WS-Agreement specification, I
don't believe WS-Agreement has met its primary goal.

Particularly in the area of condition expression languages, there has
been little successful work on feasible intersection/agreement
mechanisms other than the work done in the field of "narrowing
algorithms".  For example, there is intersection/agreement between two
general XQuery expressions is undefined.  There is a comment suggesting
that the condition expression language/dialect be completely at the
discretion of the WS-Agreement instance originator, which will make this
problem even harder unless there is a corresponding requirement that two
parties must either agree on the dialect used (and that it have a
feasible intersection/agreement mechanism) or that there must be a
defined intersection/agreement mechanism between the two dialects.

I recommend inserting a requirement that any language/dialect specified
for WS-Agreement condition expressions must have a referenceable
specification for computing intersection or agreement between any two
expressions in the language/dialect.  Unless this is done, WS-Agreement
will not meet its goals and will not be interoperable.

Regards,
Anne
-- 
Anne H. Anderson             Email: Anne.Anderson at Sun.COM
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
1 Network Drive,UBUR02-311     Tel: 781/442-0928
Burlington, MA 01803-0902 USA  Fax: 781/442-1692