Dave's comment captures a major concern I have about how the profile notion seems to be evolving.

A profile, in the sense of the WS-I profiles that formed at least the starting point for our discussion, documents a way of using well-established and widely used specifications. I believe we have fairly broad consensus for that definition.

However, we are now introducing the idea of a "draft" profile that does not need to be grounded in adoption. In so doing, I fear that we abandon the discipline that will allow us to ensure that profiles represent authoritative statements on how to build Grid systems. GGFers will conclude that a profile is a way to respectability. We will start to see many proposals for profiles, many with no connection to implementation experience or adoption, and I don't see how we will be able to say yes to some and no to others, as we will have no clear rules for doing so. Working groups will start to produce their own profiles, as well. We will end up with a set of profiles that look as diffuse and ill defined as the current set of GGF working groups. Of course, some will be "draft" and some "recommended", but I think that distinction will be lost on the community.

DAIS for me represents an excellent test case for what a profile should be. It's a nice piece of work and has at least one academic implementation. However, it hasn't seen any adoption by database vendors. That to me means that it doesn't belong in a profile. This is not to say at all that DAIS is not valuable, or that the DAIS team should not be working to get DAIS adopted by vendors. It's simply saying that a profile isn't the way to do it.

Ian.

At 09:22 AM 12/21/2004 +0000, Dave Berry wrote:

I definitely want to allow the DAIS spec in the first data profile.
This is partly the chicken and egg question; if a spec isn't in an OGSA
profile, people will be less inclined to implement it. This is
particularly applicable to the DAIS spec, because we want people to
implement it as part of their DBMS systems, not as a standalone
executable. (This is to avoid unnecessary copying of data in the
implementations).

_______________________________________________________________
Ian Foster www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster Math & Computer Science Div. Dept of Computer Science Argonne National Laboratory The University of Chicago Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A. Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A. Tel: 630 252 4619 Fax: 630 252 1997 Globus Alliance, www.globus.org