Hi Savas,
At this point I would like to point out that many UK e-Science (e.g. myGrid, Geodise, and many more) and International (e.g. SkyServer) projects successfully used existing tooling and simple WS specifications (SOAP, WSDL) as their underlying infrastructure. Perhaps with the addition of WS-Security, SAML, XACML, and even WS-Addressing (given that the entire industry is behind it even though it hasn't be finalised yet), we have an infrastructure that can be used in the design of high-level services. All these standards (specification in case of WS-Addressing) are supported by everyone and commercial, high-quality tooling already exists. I am not proposing a definite set of specs (I may have forgotten some or some may have to be removed). The OGSA WG will have to decide the common set of specs so that everyone is on board (even Microsoft). Also, I am not going to restart the 'state' argument here but I will point out that even with this simple set of specs large companies like Amazon and Google offer access to their data and functionality without requiring additional infrastructure (sorry... had to mention the 'state' word :-)))
To add some detail: 85% of requests to Amazon Web services use REST "querying Amazon using REST is 6 times faster than with SOAP" Reference: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/10/30/amazon_rest.html Not sure if the numbers are still correct. cheers Mark