

SAWSDL Spec: Some Comments

From: Rama Akkiraju <akkiraju@us.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 16:31:13 -0500
Cc: Anand Ranganathan <arangana@us.ibm.com>, Amit Paradkar <paradkar@us.ibm.com>, Adam Lally <alally@us.ibm.com>
Message-ID: <OFC4860A09.075056ED-ON85257219.0073C3ED-85257219.00763A79@us.ibm.com>


I reviewed SAWSDL spec with a few interested folks in IBM (mostly IBM
Research) and have received the following comments. I'm typing them up here
on their behalf along with the responses that I have already provided. I
wanted to bring it to the attention of larger team for additional comments.

1. Examples for associating Preconditions and Effects with Web Services:
Many people in the audience felt that they would be using SAWSDL
modelReferences for representing preconditions and effects associated with
Web services and that they would find the spec and usage guide incomplete
without at least a brief discussion on preconditions and effects and a few
examples to show how to do it (sort of like how we show examples for
publishing Web services in registries)

(My response:  We were explicitly asked to not 'discuss' preconditions and
effects in SAWSDL Working Group as part of our charter and so we didn't.
Personally, I prefer that we provide some examples for associating
preconditions and effects with WSDL documents in the usage guide. We should
discuss this in the Working Group)

2. When we associate multiple annotations with an element using
'modelReference' (eg. below) people felt that not providing an explicit
relationship (such as 'intersection') could lead to arbitrary
<xs:simpleType name="itemCode"
sawsdl:modelReference="SampleOntology#PartNumber SampleOntology#SKU"/>
    <xs:restriction base="xs:string"/>

(My response: We defer to the ontology(ies) to provide relationships
between multiple annotations as explicating any relationship in a WSDL
document at the modelReference level could create inconsistencies and
multiple places for specifying such relationships)

3. modelReference Vs. lifting and lowering schema mapping extensibility
attributes: Some people felt that they did not appreciate the distinction
between modelReference and lifting and lowering schema mapping
extensibility attributes since all three were meant to serve as URI
pointers. The question was why not just have one extensibility attribute
called modelReference and use it for everything.

(My response: modelReference is meant for associating semantic-level
annotations while lifting and lowering schema mappings are meant for
associating mappings to transform data values associated with schemas or
ontology instances. Although all three use URIs as mechanisms for achieving
this, we feel that their purposes are different enough to warrant different
extensiblity attributes)

Rama Akkiraju
Received on Wednesday, 1 November 2006 21:31:56 GMT
