Yes, I would like to echo Ian’s
comments. That is, I have only followed OGSA WG off-and-on – only to see
how it might impact our project (WSRF.NET). But I was *very* surprised to hear the word “profile”
come up, as it seems premature (certainly in the sense of WS-I) for many of the
reasons that Ian mentions. I think the community will be confused by the use of
this word. I think Ian’s points (and Dave’s points before him) are
very important and should not be taken lightly.
-- Marty
Marty Humphrey
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
From:
owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org] On Behalf Of Ian Foster
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004
8:04 AM
To: Dave Berry;
d.snelling@fle.fujitsu.com
Cc: ogsa-wg
Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] Profile
documents
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).
Math & Computer Science Div. Dept of
Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory The
Tel: 630 252
4619
Fax: 630 252 1997
Globus
Alliance, www.globus.org