Dear OGSA-WG, as part of the OMII-Europe project, I'm performing a decomposition of the functionalities provided by a number of Grid middlewares related to our project following the capabilities identified in the OGSA 1.5 document. A problem I'm dealing with is about the Job Management service. For instance, in the gLite middleware, there are two main categories of services providing job management capability: 1. the Computing Element, that is an abstraction of a batch system exposing an interface to let other services to submit and manage a job; in the near future this component will adopt the OGSA-BES interface, but at the moment it is present in different flavours (GT 2 GRAM, g-Lite CE and CREAM) 2. the Workload Management System (WMS), that is a meta-scheduler and exposes an interface to let other services to submit and manages a job (or collection of jobs or DAGs); the WMS not only does Job Management, but also Execution and Planning, and Candidate Set Generator. My doubt is the following: from the viewpoint of Job Management, are a meta-scheduler and a computing service semantically different or identical? If they are identical, is it expected that in a medium future, the BES interface could be extendend to support the number of job types handled by a meta-scheduler, hence the meta-scheduler will expose the same interface of a computing service? If they are not identical, what are the differences? Thanks in advance for your comments, Sergio Andreozzi -- Sergio Andreozzi INFN-CNAF, Tel: +39 051 609 2860 Viale Berti Pichat, 6/2 Fax: +39 051 609 2746 40126 Bologna (Italy) Web: http://www.cnaf.infn.it/~andreozzi