Baseline motivation

I had taken some notes down on my iPhone the other day that I'm going to try and transcribe and expand upon here.


Why establish a baseline (either from the policy viewpoint or the delta federation?):

• Vast amount of specifications, increasing in number at an increasing rate, with lots of overlapping information
• Certain specifications gain popularity and are adhered to while others exhibiting the same properties are specified and never used.
• By determining the common features throughout a minimum baseline of information can be established.
  
• The baseline can then be used to determine a universal mapping between expression languages (for example the differences web services specified with WSDL or REST would become meaningless assuming an appropriate mapping could be establish with sufficient coverage across all baseline entities).
• As new technologies for expression are developed they can easily be incorporated within any system using the baseline approach.

Context-Based Matching and Ranking of Web Services for Composition
Found in: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
By Aviv Segev , Eran Toch
Accepted to July 2009 Issue (not yet published)

• They have heavy use of a baseline concept in their paper, not quite the same as ours though
  
• Theirs is a "baseline method" to classify WS information
• They bring up the issue of the view of a domain, for them its the local view whereas our deltafederation would have more of a global/shared/collaborative view
• Intro also brings up the difference between exploratory composition and automatic compositions. Their research is to benefit the exploratory compositions of WS which is helpful because eventually a human guides the development of the final composition.
• They "assume each web service is described using a textual description, which is part of the meta-data within UDDI registries, and a WSDL document describing the syntactic properties of the service interface" - this seems to be a pretty standard and easy to understand statement
• To them, their baseline method is "a simple reflection (identity function) of the original bag of tokens , extracted from the service descriptoins to a bag of tokens representing sets of words". Not quite sure what that means.
  
• "Service analysis leads to the construction of the baseline" -- that could mean the entire baseline or the baseline of a specific service...
• "often WS providers do not include tags in their service descriptions [13]"
• The rest of this paper seems to be going into heavy Information Retrival analysis of the WS descriptions (inverse document frequency, term frequency, etc.). Its almost like they're building up the math for a search engine of WS.
• A lot of the context mapping in their process would be accomplished by a human in our case, I think. This type of reseach certainly enhances any toolkit tasked with that type of responsability though, but ultimately the work would require a human (I'd think).