[ogsa-wg] Profile documents

[Ian Foster]

Dave's comment captures a major concern I have about how the profile notion 
seems to be evolving.

A profile, in the sense of the WS-I profiles that formed at least the 
starting point for our discussion, documents a way of using 
well-established and widely used specifications. I believe we have fairly 
broad consensus for that definition.

However, we are now introducing the idea of a "draft" profile that does not 
need to be grounded in adoption. In so doing, I fear that we abandon the 
discipline that will allow us to ensure that profiles represent 
authoritative statements on how to build Grid systems. GGFers will conclude 
that a profile is a way to respectability. We will start to see many 
proposals for profiles, many with no connection to implementation 
experience or adoption, and I don't see how we will be able to say yes to 
some and no to others, as we will have no clear rules for doing so. Working 
groups will start to produce their own profiles, as well. We will end up 
with a set of profiles that look as diffuse and ill defined as the current 
set of GGF working groups. Of course, some will be "draft" and some 
"recommended", but I think that distinction will be lost on the community.

DAIS for me represents an excellent test case for what a profile should be. 
It's a nice piece of work and has at least one academic implementation. 
However, it hasn't seen any adoption by database vendors. That to me means 
that it doesn't belong in a profile. This is not to say at all that DAIS is 
not valuable, or that the DAIS team should not be working to get DAIS 
adopted by vendors. It's simply saying that a profile isn't the way to do it.

Ian.


At 09:22 AM 12/21/2004 +0000, Dave Berry wrote:
>I definitely want to allow the DAIS spec in the first data profile.
>This is partly the chicken and egg question; if a spec isn't in an OGSA
>profile, people will be less inclined to implement it.  This is
>particularly applicable to the DAIS spec, because we want people to
>implement it as part of their DBMS systems, not as a standalone
>executable.  (This is to avoid unnecessary copying of data in the
>implementations).

_______________________________________________________________
Ian Foster                    www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster
Math & Computer Science Div.  Dept of Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory   The University of Chicago
Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.     Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.
Tel: 630 252 4619             Fax: 630 252 1997
         Globus Alliance, www.globus.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/ogsa-wg/attachments/20041221/448f6835/attachment.html