Thijs has asked me to split out the four decisions into separate e-mail threads, hoping to separate the discussion of each independent question. So here goes - please try to separately your replies to each question and reply to the appropriate threads: Decision 1: Should OCCI specify wire format(s) or an abstract model: a) The OCCI API will be defined in terms of a specific rendering of the nouns, verbs and attributes to the actual bytes transferred on the wire. b) The OCCI API will be defined in terms of the abstract model (both nouns, verbs and attributes, and possibly also meta-model around these). Any implementation of this model is OCCI-compliant, regardless of the bytes on the wire. Perspective of myself and Alexis: OCCI should specify wire format(s), since this is the only way to guarantee in-practice interoperability between OCCI-compliant clouds.