Hi, Hiros remarks about "implementation" "conformance," and "compliance" are quite interesting I think. We might well be able to use the same criteria for SAGA. However, these definitions are still under discussion... Cheers, Andre. ----- Forwarded message from Hiro Kishimoto <hiro.kishimoto@jp.fujitsu.com> -----

Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:21:03 +0900 From: Hiro Kishimoto <hiro.kishimoto@jp.fujitsu.com> To: GFSG <gfsg@ggf.org> Subject: [gfsg] definition of "implement," "conformance," and "compliance."

Hi all,

Per request during today's GFSG standard call, I will share definition of "implement," "conformance," and "compliance."

It is in the OGSA roadmap document (GFD.53) written by Dave Berry.

2.3 OGSA Branding Given the requirement for consistency across OGSA specifications and other documents, GGF defines in [OGSA-Related Naming Guidelines] the criteria to be used in determining whether to brand entities such as working groups and documents with an OGSA prefix. The OGSA normative documents are expected to be implemented by multiple open-source software (OSS) projects and commercial software vendors. Authors of OGSA Software may claim one of three levels of agreement with the OGSA normative documents:

1. A claim to implement a specification or profile is a statement of ?best effort? to satisfy the requirements of the specification. There are no test mechanisms to guarantee the correctness of the implementation.

2. A claim of conformance to a specification or profile is a statement of intent to interoperate with other conformant implementations. Two or more implementations may test their conformance by testing how well they interoperate. A conformance claim mechanism as defined in the profile should be used to communicate conformance.

3. A claim of compliance would imply acceptance by a set of OGSA Compliance Tests. At the time of writing no such tests exist. We may expect that OGSA compliance tests will be developed that define the practical criteria that must be satisfied for a software system to be called ?OGSA-compliant.? Until such a suite is available, claims of OGSA compliance should not be made. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Andre Merzky | phon: +31 - 20 - 598 - 7759 | | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) | fax : +31 - 20 - 598 - 7653 | | Dept. of Computer Science | mail: merzky@cs.vu.nl | | De Boelelaan 1083a | www: http://www.merzky.net | | 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+