RE: Service and Action

["Burdett, David" <david.burdett@commerceone.com>]

Karsten/Marty

-----Original Message-----
From: Karsten Riemer [mailto:Karsten.Riemer@east.sun.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 2:09 PM
To: Martin W Sachs
Cc: ebxml-tp@lists.ebxml.org; ebxml-bp@lists.ebxml.org;
ebxml-transport@lists.ebxml.org
Subject: Re: Service and Action


Marty,
you are right we should plan to meet to iron this out.
Just a quick comment though. In BPSS Business Transactions are stand alone
re-usable protocols. As such they are directly under the root element for
anyone to re-use. 
<DB>There is no equivalent in TRP. I can see how having a code that
identifies the "re-usable protocol" is something that would be useful to
hold in the CPA and/or the TRP message header.</DB>

What actually executes a Business Transaction is a Business
Transaction Activity, which is the lowest level that a CPP can declare
support
of a role. Business Transaction Activities are grouped (and choreographed)
under Binary Collaborations. A Binary Collaboration always describes both
sides. I think that the term Business Service should be used to describe
only
one side. 
<DB>This agrees with the TRP idea of a service.</DB>

So I see the mapping as:

A Business Service is a set of software that can perform a set of related
roles in a set of related binary collaborations. 
<DB>This is very close to my understanding of a TRP Service. BTW, we did not
call it a Business Service since TRP could be used to support services that
are not necessarily associated with commerce.</DB>

Indirectly this means that a
business service (or its associated business service interfaces) declares
support for one side of each of the Business Transactions pointed to by the
roles through the business transaction activities.
<DB>I think that business service interface is close to what TRP calls an
Action. So for example you could have a Supplier Role that included a
Service called PurchaseOrderManagment, which had Actions called, for
example: NewPurchaseOrder, ChangePurchaseOrder, CancelPurchaseOrder.</DB>

(So Marty you were right in your original assertion that service is roughly
at
the binary collaboration level).

I don't particularly like the word Action, but if we must use it, it should
probably denote the action that a business service takes in response to a
single request. This is in line with TP's current definition. BPSS actually
has a superclass called Business Action of which  respondingBusinessActivity
is a subclass. So that aligns as well.

I think TRP needs to change their use of the words service and action as you
suggested, or to specify that these are not business service and business
action, but perhaps some lower level service and action.
<DB>We definitely at least need to talk about this.</DB>

Confused?
I will try to draw a slide of this.

-karsten 
 

>It looks to me like TP, BP, and TRP are not fully aligned with regard to
>the Service and Action constructs in the TP and TRP specs.  I think we need
>a discussion in Vienna
>
>TP is using the term Business Transaction to denote a request message
>perhaps followed by a response message (as distinct from a signal).  TP
>uses the term Service to denote a set of related Business Transactions.  I
>had thought that this corresponds to a Binary Collaboration but I see from
>the BP spec that Business Transactions are directly under the root element
>(ProcessSpecification).  It is not obvious to me what element groups a set
>of related Business Transactions other than the root and therefore it
>appears that Service is synonymous with the whole ProcessSpecification
>document.
>
>TP is using the term Action to denote a single Business Transaction within
>a Service.
>
>TRP is using the term Service to denote a single Business Transaction.
>
>TRP is using the term Action to denote a single process within a Service.
>But if a Service is a single Business Transaction, then it is not clear
>that there is more than one process within a Service and therefore it isn't
>clear that Action has any value.
>
>In addition, I am having trouble discerning from the BPSS DTD where the
>actual sending and receiving of messages are indicated, what the
>differences are among Business Transactions and Binary Collaborations, and
>how Binary Collaborations relate to Service and Action.
>
>Regards,
>Marty
>
>***************************************************************************
**********
>
>Martin W. Sachs
>IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
>P. O. B. 704
>Yorktown Hts, NY 10598
>914-784-7287;  IBM tie line 863-7287
>Notes address:  Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM
>Internet address:  mwsachs @ us.ibm.com
>***************************************************************************
**********
>
>
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