WS-Agreement is supposed to be "a Web Services protocol for establishing agreement between two parties". Unless there are defined mechanisms for reaching agreement on the contents of a WS-Agreement specification, I don't believe WS-Agreement has met its primary goal. Particularly in the area of condition expression languages, there has been little successful work on feasible intersection/agreement mechanisms other than the work done in the field of "narrowing algorithms". For example, there is intersection/agreement between two general XQuery expressions is undefined. There is a comment suggesting that the condition expression language/dialect be completely at the discretion of the WS-Agreement instance originator, which will make this problem even harder unless there is a corresponding requirement that two parties must either agree on the dialect used (and that it have a feasible intersection/agreement mechanism) or that there must be a defined intersection/agreement mechanism between the two dialects. I recommend inserting a requirement that any language/dialect specified for WS-Agreement condition expressions must have a referenceable specification for computing intersection or agreement between any two expressions in the language/dialect. Unless this is done, WS-Agreement will not meet its goals and will not be interoperable. Regards, Anne -- Anne H. Anderson Email: Anne.Anderson@Sun.COM Sun Microsystems Laboratories 1 Network Drive,UBUR02-311 Tel: 781/442-0928 Burlington, MA 01803-0902 USA Fax: 781/442-1692