[i] OHS45 minutes

From: Sigi Reich (sr_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 22 Sep 1998 - 11:37:22 CDT

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Hello everyone,

this is to update you on the OHS 4.5 working group meeting which took place in sunny Southampton (yes, it was really sunny!) last weekend (Friday to Sunday lunchtime, see also
http://www.mmrg.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~sr/ohs/ohs45/themeeting.html).

We started with presentations of
- performatives and why such a mechanism is useful for OHP (Sigi)

• the definition of services and how they could be used in OHP (Dave)
• architecture, interface definitions as well as a proposal for a data model (Kaj)
• the Web technologies XLink, XPointer and SMIL (Les, on Sunday morning)

We also had a short session on the "7 Issues' paper" and how/whether these could be addressed with the current definition of OHP. We concluded that we weren't doing too badly with respect to the issues but that we will not address versioning.

We agreed that we would produce a common document with separate chapters addressing the following items:

• although an IDL might not be the ideal way of defining what OHP was all about we didn't really find an appropriate "formalism" so we decided to use IDL as a mechanism for describing the basic interface(s). These definitions together with verbal descriptions that will serve for clarifications will make a document that forms the core interface description. The idea is that on top of these definitions (different) frameworks can be developed with which at a later stage client developers will be able to easily program OHP conforming applications.
• for the moment (probably until a demo at HT99) we will stay with XML and plain sockets for actually communicating OHP (the "on-the-wire specification"). This requires the IDL definition to be "translated" onto an XML DTD. This will be specified in a separate document. The main reason for this is to clearly demonstrate that we envisage other communication mechanisms to be used in the future (if one has an IDL definition the most obvious way would be some CORBA implementation).

We agreed on a data model (yes!) including a definition of services (which we will call computations) which could contain actual code.

We also had a long partially controversial discussion of how to actually include the idea of performatives into an IDL definition. I believe we agreed on the usefulness of performatives and their general expressiveness. However, there were different opinions on how to integrate them into IDL definitions. We have decided that the IDL of the Danish proposal will be extended to incorporate the changes we decided at the meeting and that Sotonians will come up with an IDL specification containing performatives.

We also talked about publications, demos and visibility. The following table summarises people in charge of those publications/demonstrations that we think the OHSWG's interoperability effort should produce. Note, that this does not mean that these people actually have to write these documents themselves!!!

People in charge Publication

Dave/Sigi              Tech. Briefing HT99, deadline 1st Oct.
Dave/Sigi              Demo at HT99, deadline 27th Nov.
Hugh                   WWW8 paper, deadline 30th Nov.
Dave/Sigi              Web description which we would like to link 
                       to the JoDI publications, as soon as possible
Kaj                    "New Review's Special Issue.", early 99

Other Actions:
The "Danes" update the existing data model specification with what was agreed at the meeting; Danes and Sotonians both come up with IDL specifications and agree on a final version soon (i.e. within the next few weeks). Plus the actions as shown in the above table. Plus any implementations of OHP that have to be written ;-).

Thanks to everyone for participating / contributing!!!

Cheers,

Dave & Sigi

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