[infod-wg] discussion around 'description' field and entity managers

[Ronny Fehling]

Hi,


Steve and I agreed to move our discussion from today’s call onto an email thread where everybody can participate.


Basically, there are two suggestions that came from Steve with regards to the interfaces.    · To merge




BasePublisherManager
BaseSubscriberManager
BaseConsumerManager

into a common entity manager. They look a lot alike and have essentially the same operations. 

I don’t know Steve, what you want to do with the BaseSubscriptionManager as it is quite different to the rest…

As Dieter had pointed out a while ago, these Entity-manager interfaces could be viewed as a special case of the internal INFOD vocabulary; so theoretically, it makes sense to see them joined. One counter argument is if it makes the interfaces too cumbersome. I actually don’t know what the original reason was to separate them as I wasn’t part of INFOD back then. Input?    · The second discussion point is a little more sensible. Basically, Steve observed that by me adding a description field to each interface (as discussed at GGF16), there was an explicit vocabulary reference within the entity management interface:

        <wsinfod:PublisherDescription Vocabulary=”xsd:anyURI”>
	     { any } ?
	</wsinfod:PublisherDescription> ?

 Although intended to be merely a way to include arbitrary descriptions (potentially opening up a work-around for not-yet implemented functionalities), one could regard this from the view of a vocabulary that is referenced this way by the entity as an implicit instantiation of that vocabulary.

So, rather than having to create a separate instance of a vocabulary and bind it to an entity, we could have the entity explicitly reference a vocabulary and with that become implicitly an instantiation of that vocabulary.

However, this will have a couple of impacts:

a.       We allow multiple vocabulary references for an entity. This means that to manage them, alterEntity interface would have to be used – is this conceptually correct?

b.       As we allow multiple instances of one vocabulary, is the management of vocabulary change and the potential impact on the entities a harder problem now?


c.       As we allow multiple associations, is the management a harder problem now?

Also, before, the Description field could hold any ‘blob’-vocabulary and the registry wouldn’t care as it wouldn’t have to parse it. Now, the description vocabulary and entry needs to be verified by the registry. We therefore loose the back-door for advanced features that we had before.

Also, the Description field used to be an aid to the discovery for entities that could facilitate the search for specific entities by ‘savant’ end-users (who could parse the description field with its arbitrary vocabulary). We would loose that ability – if we don’t add a new free-form description field.

 These are some of the thoughts I had on Steve’s comment (after finally understanding what he meant in his email ;-) ).
Any Input / comments?

 
Ronny Fehling
Solutions Architect Manager
Oracle Strategic Development
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-----Original Message-----
>From Steve Fisher <S.M.Fisher at rl.ac.uk (mailto:S.M.Fisher at rl.ac.uk)>
Sent Wed 3/29/2006 11:34 AM
To infod-wg at ggf.org (mailto:infod-wg at ggf.org)
Subject [infod-wg] Clarification

Hi,

Can somebody remind me please:

For each entity -e.g. create publisher we have the
PublisherDescription of type any. This is I preume for storing the
properties of the entity subject to the rules defined in the
corresponding vocab. So what is the CreatePropertyVocabularyInstance
doing? This is certainly in line with the property vocabs.

Why do we have both?

I have also noticed PublisherPolicy and PublisherProcess - do we
really need these in the base spec. They seem to be poorly defined at
the moment. If we need it can't it just be part of the property vocab?
and so not explicit in the specs?

Steve




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