Hi Michael, Yes, I off course agree with your statement that all three must be taken into consideration. In practice, many implementations do not follow this line however -- but they should. I guess there is a trade off between making the protocol too complex -- so much so that no one will actually use it -- vs. making it complete -- so that it takes account of everything that is useful. But you are right. Thanks also for the additional links. Seems like I have my reading set out for this w/end. regards Omer Michael Parkin wrote:
Hi Omer,
Thanks for your reply.
On 24 Aug 2007, at 10:53, Omer F Rana wrote:
My undersstanding of the Mobach et al. paper -- and the reason the 2PC approach was chosen was to satisfy legal constraints that they were working on. Their aim was more to ensure that legally both parties were covered, more than looking into the specifics of constraints of a distributed implementation.
I believe that the legal, distributed computing _and_ business aspects of agreement must be considered together to design a successful contract negotiation and formation protocol - they cannot be considered separately. When all three aspects are taken into account together it is clear that 2PC-type protocols are inappropriate for cross-administrative domain negotiation because of the risk of blocking that is introduced, as I described in my previous email.
Work we have done [1] together with the School of Law at Manchester University investigates maintaining the legalities of contract negotiation and formation (including adhering to the EU's e-Commerce directive) whilst still allowing the entity supplying the resources/ services not to be blocked, thus satisfying the requirements of business. Section 4.1 of the linked paper discusses blocking.
Dean Kuo (who many of you know...[2]) and I are writing up and formally specifying the protocol we derived from this work and will be submitting this work for publication soon.
Michael.
[1] http://www2.cs.man.ac.uk/~parkinm/publications/ eChallenges_e2006_ref_235.pdf [2] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~dkuo/
-- graap-wg mailing list graap-wg@ogf.org http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/graap-wg
-- http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/index.html / work-fax:+44(0)29-2087-4598 work:+44(0)29-2087-5542 / other:+44(0)7956-299981 / distributed collaborative computing / room n2.14 / school of computer science / cardiff university queen's buildings / newport road / cardiff cf24 3aa / wales / uk