[OGSA-BES-WG] BES question

[Donal K. Fellows]

Steven Newhouse wrote:
>> The other thing is that from my observation so far the
>> ReferenceParameters contains only job id and that's all, no other
>> information is there.
> 
> That is required by the BES specification. Other services and systems 
> are free to use the ReferenceParameter system to provide other 
> information and do...
> 
> You may have identified a need for an optional human readable identifier...

As I understand the currents of opinion within the OGSA-WG, the idea is
that the EPRs out of a BES will actually be WS-Names, and that the
abstract name parts of each WS-Name will be the human-readable part that
you are looking for. This isn't officially recommended yet though,
mostly due to unpleasant politics and the fact that nobody's written the
profile yet[*]. (I can't remember if such a profiling is on the current
work roster or not; it might not be if people decide they need a few
more things first to make a good profile.)

I suggest that if you're dealing with non-names, you should generate
some magic names yourself in your portal and maintain a mapping from
those to EPRs. You could even do some clever stuff so that the portal
acts as the naming service for the dumb BES instances. That's the sort
of thing that people developing portals for this sort of thing have had
to do in the past anyway.

Donal.
[* Correct me if I'm wrong! ]