Friday, February 02, 2007
Resilience Project White Paper
(Response to note from The
Speaker’s Office [376] )
(Response à to [376] )
Starting the Discussion with the National Science Foundation
About the proposed Resilience Project
Communication to Service-Oriented Architecture CoP
See http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/gall
One might wonder how the world
would be if the W3C had adopted a clear and transparent understanding of the
nature of human communication.
Many, but not all, of the position papers at
http://www.w3.org/2006/10/wos-ec-cfp.html
sell the notion that what the industry has done is somehow amazing. This is like the recent pitch from Microsoft ...
However, there is a sea change.
One element of this sea change is the most excellent (year 2000) work by David Fields on "Representational State Transfer" (REST). [1]
The fact is that the web service and SOA (service oriented architecture) paradigms are suffering from an absence of deep theory, expressed in an elegant fashion. This absence of proper grounding has lead to many errors, the RDF (resource description framework) standard being one obvious one. But RDF, when used, may be layered on a REST foundation, and thus does not harm REST.
(David Booth, at HP takes the opposite position in his position paper at
http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/booth “to suggest another way of thinking about SOA in terms of RDF message exchange”. We feel that this is a mistake. )
I believe that REST provides the proper elegance to a future Internet.
The paper that David Webber is pointing the CIO Council forum to
http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/gall
echoes my and others comments about the W3C has having created a poor foundation.
<quote from Nick Gall's
paper>
Web Services based on SOAP and WSDL are "Web" in name only. In fact, they are a hostile overlay of the Web based on traditional enterprise middleware architectural styles that has fallen far short of expectations over the past decade.
<end quote>
This paper is one of the clearest presentations of the failure of “IT”
to understand the problem that our society needs solved, and for which “we” are
paying an increasingly high cost.
The paper from IBM is interesting. The paper starts out
with a discussion of REST (Representational State Transfer) and its
relationships to the many acronyms for what are often the means to make data
non-interoperable.
<Quote>
RepresentationalStateTransfer (REST) is the architectural model of the World Wide Web. REST does not itself define the technical building blocks of the Web, such as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), the HTTP protocol, or various media types. Rather, it provides guidelines for the development and use of such technologies in a manner designed to provide the necessary scalability and flexibility for a distributed system of global proportions, such as the World Wide Web. For example, while the Web allows for resources to be named with URIs, REST specifies that every interesting resource should have its own URI name. Every such resource is thus directly “on the Web”, and can be accessed from browsers, cell phones, server applications, etc. can be bookmarked, linked from emails, and so on.
<end quote>
and a little later the paper addresses the human interface aspect
Many enterprises have need of exposing services both to machine and human participants. Examples abound, such as the use case in which an OEM exposes its B2B supply-chain interfaces both as a SOAP-based Web services and as a Web forms-based interface for small and medium sized business partners that may have nothing more than a Web browser at their disposal with which to interact with their supply-chain partner. A concrete example of an industry standard that demonstrates this is RosettaNet, which has both a SOAP-based Web services interface as well as a Web forms based interface (RAE). Other industries have need of similar function, such as the automotive industry, that has need to interact with its supply-chain partners in Chinaor other emerging economies.
<end quote>
the paper concludes with
We believe that REST should be both well supported, and fully exploited in SOA software offerings.
which we agree with completely.
The problem that REST does not address is knowledge management, and
knowledge representation.
Dr Field’s 2000 PhD thesis does not focus on human
knowledge. REST allows a layering of elegance but only if the
foundational principles of human science about human communication is known by
those who develop this layer. I
have claimed that those experts who have developed the W3C standards are not so
informed.
The IBM paper does discuss briefly the human side of the web, and does
so in a way that I see as very respecting of the natural science.
The core problem that we have with W3C specifications for RDF and OWL
(Web Ontology Language) lies in what is layered on top of a proper formulation
of REST (which we consider to be very optimal).
We have proposed an "n"-ary ontological modeling language
without deep entanglement of inference engines. See the White Paper on the Resilience
Project. This "n"-ary modeling language is very simple and
is amenable to a topic map interface.
Nick Gall’s paper, as does several others at:
http://www.w3.org/2006/10/wos-ec-cfp.html
talk about the “WS-Addressing endpoint references (EPR)s” (see
Section titled “Endpoint Reference (EPR) v URI” in http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/ibm).
A “Global Context Computing” paradigm establishes a proper level of
sophistication where an evolving theory of type is allocated dynamically in
ways similar to how natural language is modified and used
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/392.htm
We end with a quote from
http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/iona
But can
it really be said that the goal of enterprise software standardization has been
achieved through SOAP and WSDL? Has the cost of assembling software components
from multiple suppliers been significantly reduced, or the efficiency of
connecting software systems from multiple suppliers? Has the time it takes to
modernize existing systems been reduced?
Or has the adoption of Web
services specifications tended to be adapted towards extending and enhancing
existing vendor technologies more than toward meeting the goals of industry
standardization?
Note sent January 29th à [382]
January 30th reply from NSF à [383]
[1] Fields, David (2000) Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures