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Tim Bray wrote:
> is coherent, or sensible, or viable, or generally that the parrot is
> not dead?
>
I wonder if the list might be symptomatic of there not being a shared
goal, beyond a vague idea of distributed software built on XML. Contrast
with the Semantic Web initiative where there's Berners-Lee's vision of a
web of machine-processible data built on the current web. As it's built
upon existing systems a layered approach was sensible [1], and for it to
be a *single* (global) web, development of a framework (RDF) was another
sensible choice. Those things in place the roadmap is much clearer.
There's a common language which can be used for creating more
domain-specific languages which helps avoid the proliferation of
task-specific syntaxes, the basic logical model allows more
sophisticated languages to be built on top (OWL). Parallel and in part
in concert with web service languages (esp. WSDL) the OWL-S language is
being built on the existing framework rather than pretty much creating a
from-scratch model X for every WS-X. It's irrelevant whether or not the
Semantic Web vision is a pipe dream - it has encouraged coherence in
development.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure all those individual WS-X models will be
mappable into the RDF model as they are essentially based on many of the
same ground rules - HTTP, URIs, domain-specific vocabularies, open
world. I suspect longer term that WS-* may even need such a common model
to unify what appear to be fairly disparate languages with only limited
endpoints of intersection.
So regarding WS-* : yes, I think it will be coherent, sensible and
viable in the long term, given that web-natural selection will sort out
what's actually needed, and there may be cross-fertilization and merging
of these specs. But I suspect a lot of effort might have been saved had
development started with something resembling a shared goal.
Cheers,
Danny.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/slide17-0.html
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