RE: Collaboration Services (was: Business Service Interface)

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

<Stefano Pogliani>
I did not fully understand the position which is expressed in your message. What Bob was saying (if I interpret correctly) is, in summary, that :
	- sequencing is not a pattern that could be generally used to
	  model the business intelligence
	- that some software (Bob mentions two levels) is required to 
	  manage long collaborations (and their status)
</Stefano Pogliani>

Stefano, thank you for a careful reading.  Slight clarification: 
I would not deny the usefulness of simple sequencing in some
cases, but there are other important cases where it is inadequate
and pre and post conditions would also be simple and work well.
I believe there is general agreement in the BP group now that
pre and post conditions are important choreography hooks.
What do you think?

<Stefano Pogliani>
What may be diverging is the judgement of what is "a neutral framework". I agree with you that the ebXML specs should not design how this software should be developed. But I believe that some specifications of the functionalities provided by this piece of software would be very important to grant runtime interoperability across different implementations. The management of long conversations and the choreographic model of the conversations "may" fall (IMHO) inside these specifications. In some way, if (I say "if") we accept the concept that state-management is something important, I guess that the state should be managed the same way everywhere in terms of functionalities (then, if one uses a Relational DB and Java and somebody else uses some other mechanism, that is not important).

	The real point is the "if"...
</Stefano Pogliani>

Part of my point in this discussion has been that the ebXML (BP) metamodel
already specifies a choreographical model for long conversations in "almost"
enough detail so that most of the common collaboration patterns can be
managed.  What needs to be added is refinements - little if any additional scope
(in my opinion). More work on these patterns will be forthcoming from the
Core Process group.

However, there has not been much discussion on the software required
to handle these collaborations.  There is a spec for the software required
to handle the smaller commercial transaction patterns included in
the metamodel spec (see Figures 12 & 13).  But I have not seen
much discussion about software to handle that spec.  

Thus I was really interested to see you and a few others starting
to address these issues, and wanted to engage you in discussing
the whole range of implications and how they relate to the metamodel
spec.

Thanks for the continuing conversation,
Bob Haugen