The group will examine and create specifications related to distributed computation and storage, with an XML network transport layer and possible mapping to RDF.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Comments are invited (via the mailing list) as to a proposal to create a separate “algorithmic modelling” group, concerning itself with generic modelling (of which the computational modelling of this group is but one specialisation), thereby allowing the computational modelling portion of this group’s standard to refer to that group’s work, thereby avoiding unnecessary duplication.
This may be necessary to allow, for example, AI related specifications referring to “conceptual modelling” (another type of modelling) to also refer to that group’s output
This latest report concerns the specification of an abstract model for distributed computation, which also includes a specification for distributed storage.
I’m sure you all know by now that feed-back is still always welcome 🙂
Another report has made its way onto the “reports” section of this group’s page, this one concerning “service engagement”:, detailing the process by which the services of a cloud provider may be initiated.
Some may have noticed, by now, the publication
of this group’s first report, a “requirements and
use cases” document, in the form of its appearance
in the “reports” section of this group’s home page.
For those who have the time to look through it,
please let me know (I would suggest through the
mailing list) if you find any errors, or otherwise
have any questions
Just thought I’d christen this group with some tentative ideas (dare I call it a “seeding of our cloud-making efforts”? 🙂 as to directions we might be pursue in the development of cloud-related standards .
These ideas are highly tentative: I definitely welcome feedback, especially from those with more particular expertise in the relevant areas than myself (being none in particular 🙂
First of all, I think we’ll need some type of “engagement” ontology (meaning a description of the ways in which cloud services may be engaged) and a set of polices (possibly in the form of a RIF rule set) detailing the procedure used to select a cloud service or set of services
We’ll also need to think about how we should utilise models in our cloud processing, and how we should represent our models. I think we’ll need to two types of models: a “computational” model (referring to the flow of control of execution within a single type of cloud processor) and a “physical” model (how the configuration of processors, proxies, gateways and sub-clouds combine to collectively implement the cloud’s task).
For such modelling we could use ideas from the XMI model representation (if nothing else, because it’s in XML) within the OMG’s MDA infrastructure, as well as from XProc
However these models are represented, they’ll most likely also need some kind of API representing the execution’s environment which, in the case of the computational model, would represent interfaces to data connections with neighbouring nodes (although I don’t yet know whether these interfaces should be configurable)
I also like the idea of being able to reference related models by URI (with a fragment identifier further locating contained model elements) , which is in keeping with other W3C standards.
The RDF mapping I mentioned in the group’s summary is intended to enable RDF processors to also perform cloud processing, bringing with it the benefit of an existing DOM API for making dynamic changes to models (although this could also be accomplished by other means)
But, as mentioned, these are all tentative ideas, and further input is welcome and encouraged 🙂
