Interoperability and Reuse with WS-Agreement Problems for Discussion as of January 20, 2004

The GRAAP working group of the Global Grid Forum is drafting a specification for the management of resources and services using negotiated service level agreements in a Web services environment (WS-Agreement). This memo discusses ongoing design considerations for this activity, focusing on the desire to strike a balance between goals for flexibility, reusability, and interoperability of systems utilizing the WS-Agreement interface. If WS-Agreement services are to be discovered and utilized by clients in a large-scale environment, their extended negotiation capabilities, policies, and offered services must be available for search, inspection, and comparison. The GRAAP working group faces difficult design challenges to achieve these goals while utilizing Web services technologies for term and constraint languages, negotiation messages, negotiator characterization, and negotiator discovery.