[ogsa-wg] Profile documents

[Norman Paton]

As a DAIS co-chair, it seems reasonable for me to pitch in a view here - 
a personal one rather than a group one for now, as there are no 
scheduled calls for the group until the new year. 

It seems reasonable:

1. That profiles should only have dependencies on formally accepted 
standards (any dependencies on less mature or stable specifications 
means building the house on sand).
2. That once a specification has been accepted as a standard by the GGF, 
the GGF should seek facilitate the wide adoption of that standard.

The DAIS specs are not formally adopted standards (but are currently 
rather stalled waiting for stability in the WSRF space), and thus should 
not be candidates for inclusion in a profile in the short term. However, 
a feature of the DAIS specs is that they have deliberately constrained 
ambition.  That is, they seek to provide specific pieces in a jigsaw 
that as a whole provides comprehensive data access, delivery and 
management capabilities in a service-oriented environment.  As such, 
although the DAIS specs seek to provide useful functionality on their 
own, they will be even more useful (!) when used in conjunction with 
other specifications. As such, the development of profiles that 
demonstrate how DAIS specs should be used in conjunction with other 
specifications as part of a collection of data-oriented services seems 
likely to be important to uptake. I would expect a similar case to apply 
to other specifications (i.e. whole > sum of parts).  As such, profiles 
should be able to be seen as a way of encouraging wider adoption of GGF 
standards.

Regards, Norman

p.s. A more minor comment on two words in Ian's email - one shouldn't 
see "database vendors" as the only candidate commercial developers of 
DAIS specifications.  Clearly such vendors have been major players in 
the development of the DAIS specifications, but one could certainly see 
other forms of commercial organisation (e.g. middleware vendors) as 
viable candidates.

> 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 
> <http://www.mcs.anl.gov/%7Efoster>
> 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/>
>