All, (Note: I started this email before the call - I will finish it but do not believe it will change any minds.) I think defining IDL's will lead to non-interoperation without significant work on wire format .. think CORBA and its failure until IIOP happened. That said, here is a concrete proposal. Start with BES AS IS Create a new porttype BES_Extensions that defines two new functions ActivityResonse [] CreateActivitySet(ActivityDocument []) - based upon the BES create activity The activity response is an EPR or a SOAP 1.1 fault message element Define a StateTransferElement to be a <EPR, Destination_state) where destination state is a string formatted as per the BES specification Define a TransitionResponse to be a <new_state_string | SOAP1.1 fault message) TransitionResponse [] StateTransfer (StateTransferElement []) Profile ActivityEndpoint porttype MUST support getResourceProperties MUST support RNS:list RNS:list MUST return a predefined set of <name, EPR> pairs that contain the job information people want, e.g., session_directory, status Then create a PGI-Basic-Profile Conformance targets MUST handle HPC-BP, HPC-FSE (implies MUST support BES 1.0 FactoryPortType and JSDL) MUST support BES-Extensions MUST return EPRs to resources that support ActivityEndpoint MUST support state model profiles for staging, suspend, whatever_you_want_to_call_the_states_for_ARC if corresponding mechanism is supported MUST support ActivityDocument element <StartInPending> MUST/MAY support notification - we can argue this out - I do not have a strong feeling - we support it, but we also poll I would suggest that we have a separate conformance claim supporting RNS directly. This leaves one big question: How to handle GLUE? For this to be answered requires that the specific elements of GLUE2 to be indentified. Keep in mind the BES authors anticipated GLUE finalizing at some point. That said we either simply add the desired GLUE XML attributes to the results returned from getFactoryAttributesDocument, create a new function that returns just the GLUE, or perhaps better yet support getResourceProperties (I'd recommend using OGSA-WSRF-BP, it is supported in Teragrid and caGrid in the US, also I think by Unicore, and by Genesis II) and return the GLUE XML as resource properties. A