On Jan 22, 2008 3:00 PM, Gervas Douglas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <<With the advent of Web services, most enterprises that I deal with > now have thousands sometimes tens of thousands of services under > management. To make matters even more complex, we also have to > consider services that are out of our direct control, those found on > the open Internet (public services). Clearly, you can count on the > number of these services increasing over time, perhaps very quickly > over the next few years. > > While we do have some interface information about these services, as > defined by standards such as WSDL and UDDI, we really need a more > complete set of info surrounding the services in order to create a > proper SOA. This information should include things such as; the > purpose, interfaces, parameters, rules, logic, owner, semantics, > included services, and other important data. Let's call this what it > is, a service descriptions. > ... > You can read this at: > http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2008/01/some_thoughts_o.html?source=NLC-SOA&cgd=2008-01-22
David's otherwise reasonable discussion of what would be useful in a description of a service makes the same mistake that most proponents of formal description languages make: it simply assumes that all of the useful description aspects (eg purpose, interfaces, owner, service levels) need to be described in a formal language for machine discovery -- instead of informally described in English for human understanding. Given the massive complexity involved in formalizing such rich service descriptions in a standard machine processable way, such an assumption is unwarranted. Someone needs to demonstrate that moving from comprehensive informal service description in English to formal machine processable service descriptions is worth the effort. So far, all evidence is to the contrary. -- Nick
