RE: [ogsa-wg] FINAL CALL: OGSA 1.5 Architecture and Glossary
Hi, David: I agree with the modifications. But while we are on the topic I think Karl's point on BETWEEN and REGARDING is along the lines of what I was thinking but I guess where I was taking this was in the distinction between "establishment" and "honoring/binding" of agreement. The establishment can be done between two parties (e.g. between lawyers in the real world) but is binding on the parties (either singly or multiply(sp?)) that have delegated to the establishers. In this example, the lawyers are not the "legally bound parties" though they were instrumental in setting up the agreement. (The analogy in the grid could be pools that span hard boundaries (e.g. organizational).) In this case though there is a single agreement, it is between multiple parties (each playing a role and executing a responsibility as per the agreement). So from the "binding" view/perspective the agreement is between multiple parties but from the establishment perspective it is one-one. I have been taking agreement to be more closely tied to the "honoring/binding" and less to the "establishment" since higher order decisions can be made on an agreement if there is a reasonable "guarantee" that it will be honored. Advisory agreements have their place but I don't see that as the dominant model. Would it be accurate to observe that where the disconnect here is that the view taken in the thread is that the establishment is the key and hence having that bi-party is desired but I have taken the "binding/honoring view" where the referenced parties define the agreement? BTW: I agree with the comments on the consumer/producer roles are not fixed. If I did come across as otherwise it was inadvertent. I actually used the term provider which I envisioned as including consumer and/or producer and additional aspects like say manageability. Ravi -----Original Message----- From: owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org] On Behalf Of David Snelling Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 1:24 AM To: Karl Czajkowski Cc: Subramaniam, Ravi; Andreas Savva; ogsa-wg Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] FINAL CALL: OGSA 1.5 Architecture and Glossary Karl, On 14 Jul 2006, at 06:22, Karl Czajkowski wrote:
On Jul 13, Subramaniam, Ravi modulated:
Hi David,
I see what you are saying and I did consider that. The glossary term implied a "many to one" or "one to one" situation - one provider. What I was suggesting is a "one to many" situation which is very likely. So the situation where you have multiple providers accepting to an agreement (which at a higher level may be a single contract between domains) is still a "one to many" situation that the glossary term should cover. Right?
Ravi
If you want to be general, I think the agreement should be BETWEEN two parties (i.e. the legally bound parties) but REGARDING multiple services, some of which may be provided (directly or indirectly) by either party.
+1, but all services involved must be referenced in the agreement.
I also think the important thing is to realize that the services must be described clearly in terms of domain-specific operating constraints, including the roles/responsibilities of the agreeing parties. It is folly to try to state these roles in general about the agreement parties in isolation from the service-specific models.
The idea of who is the "producer" and the "consumer" is really domain-specific and there are plenty of cases where you have to stand on your head and count backwards to even make such a distinction. (For example, with peering arrangements: you would have to factor out the peering "service" into separate parts where you look at each part as a directed provider/consumer aspect of the overall service.)
The idea of having a producer/consumer, while common, is really not general enough. In an agreement both parties have obligations and both provide some form of service. Even if money is involved, that can flow in both directions, penalties. I believe the relationship should be 100% symmetric. I would alter the definition as below, but I'm ok with it as is. An agreement defines a dynamically-established and dynamically- managed relationship between two parties. The object of the relationship is the exchange of services between the parties within the context of the agreement. The management of this relationship is achieved by agreeing on the respective roles, rights and obligations of the parties. The agreement may specify not only functional properties for identification or creation of services, but also non- functional properties of the services such as performance or availability. Entities can dynamically establish and manage agreements via Web service interfaces. See https://forge.gridforum.org/projects/graap-wg for information about work being carried out by the OGF's Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol (GRAAP) working group.
karl
-- Karl Czajkowski karlcz@univa.com
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On Jul 17, Subramaniam, Ravi modulated: ...
Would it be accurate to observe that where the disconnect here is that the view taken in the thread is that the establishment is the key and hence having that bi-party is desired but I have taken the "binding/honoring view" where the referenced parties define the agreement?
Unfortunately, I don't think that is the disconnect. Apologies for this long e-mail, but I want to recap some of the issues which have haunted WS-Agreement. There are three different relationships, as you mention. This same debate was had regarding WS-Agreement, and it wasn't merely an issue of feature minimization, but also a philosophical issue: 1. The communicating parties in the "establishment" of the agreement, obviously important in WS-Agreement. These are the "initiator" and "responder" roles in our protocol. One can actually design multi-party protocols here, but the debate is whether this is desirable---whether it models the underlying relationships and decision-making that is to be exposed. 2. The obligated parties of the agreement. We basically map these to the protocol roles in WS-Agreement, but we recognize that they can be delegated relationships... this is part of the internal logic of the service to either make decisions or "broker" decisions. As you said, the communicating parties "represent" the obligating parties during the establishment of the agreement. This obligating relationship is actually what people are referring to when they say that, in practice, real world agreements that "appear" multi-party are really sets of bilateral agreements. This boils down to how the obligated parties can reconcile things with an auditer or within a legal system. This is complicated by the fact that new entities are sometimes introduced, e.g. a set of members agreeing bilaterally with an "association" over which the entities will also gain fractional control. 3. The services which are the subject of obligations. It sounds like everyone here is seeing this the same way, so I won't belabor the point. The two philosophical debates to be had are regarding the cardinality of these obligating relationships (2) and also whether the obligating relationships are important to informing the communication patterns and semantics of the protocol. I think the best reason to investigate real-world agreements/contracts is to see what we can learn from them about practical solutions that have been found. For example, this can inform us on the important differences between negotiation+agreement, performance, and reconciliation which may occur in different overlapping but not equal time periods. (For example, one might legally resolve a contract dispute after the "service period" is over, but before the contract has become legally irrelevant.) This has helped GRAAP-WG to delineate the function of WS-Agreement service representations: our service represents a basic negotiation and agreed-service monitoring infrastructure, but retires agreements to some presumed external entity for audit and reconciliation. Our agreement language is (hopefully) complete enough to guide the reconciliation phase, as well as to guide the actual negotiation and performance phases. However, I personally belong to the school which sees this as just a useful model for automated agreement patterns. It makes the distributed architecture more understandable to follow the social idioms used for human-based agreements and contracts. There are those who even question the legality of things like digital signature and non-repudiation. I do not want adaptive computing systems to really be forming legally binding obligations. With their problems, digital signatures are still much easier to justify than the idea that we can delegate legal responsibilities to a machine-driven decision process! I think there are examples of machine-driven, binding decisions out there, e.g. in the financial trading sector. But, I think many computer systems operators/owners will be scared away from Grid technologies if they are told that their computer will now begin signing contracts which bind the owner... I think we need a lower barrier to entry into this field. karl -- Karl Czajkowski karlcz@univa.com
participants (2)
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Karl Czajkowski -
Subramaniam, Ravi