[ogsa-wg] Profile documents

[Marty Humphrey]

Yes, I would like to echo Ian's comments. That is, I have only followed OGSA
WG off-and-on - only to see how it might impact our project (WSRF.NET). But
I was *very* surprised to hear the word "profile" come up, as it seems
premature (certainly in the sense of WS-I) for many of the reasons that Ian
mentions. I think the community will be confused by the use of this word. I
think Ian's points (and Dave's points before him) are very important and
should not be taken lightly.

 

-- Marty

 

Marty Humphrey

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

University of Virginia

 

  _____  

From: owner-ogsa-wg at ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg at ggf.org] On Behalf Of Ian
Foster
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 8:04 AM
To: Dave Berry; d.snelling at fle.fujitsu.com
Cc: ogsa-wg
Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] Profile documents

 

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 <http://www.globus.org/> 

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