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From: Samuel L. B. <sa...@mi...> - 2002-04-26 20:13:59
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It occurred to me and I'm sure I'm not the only one, that the design of GCSI will make it a good candidate to a Web Service based infrastructure with some changes perhaps. Today if somebody would like to build a GSCI based dialogue system, he/she needs to download the infrastructure, compile it, try to put together a collection of servers and finally write a HUB program that will integrate them into a workable dialogue system. Getting all the necessary servers could be a real pain not mention making them run under one's operating systems. With the increase growing of Internet bandwidth and with the increasing popularity of web based services based on (JAX or .NET), GCSI compliant servers could be made available online by various developing parties. The advantage is that they would be upgraded and maintained permanently. The GCSI isn't necessarily compliant with any of these emerging protocols (or previous ones like CORBA, SOAP, RMI, etc.), but I still think it counts as a network service. After all, you don't need to be running your components locally; you can set up your Hub to contact them anywhere. I can run a Hub here at MITRE which contacts one of your servers at Sheffield, and except for latency and firewall issues (which you'll encounter with any Web service), everything will still work. If someone wanted to start a cottage industry running GCSI-compliant servers 24/7, I don't think there's anything to prevent them from doing so right now; the "parser server in Kansas" model is certainly something we originally aimed to support. Tomorrow maybe, in order to build a GCSI based dialogue system, one would only need to download and compile the HUB and start writing a HUB program that will integrate various GCSI servers available as web services... In other words, "today maybe". Am I missing something? If the issue is standards compliance, I can certainly see your point, but if the issue is (very-)remote access, I'm not sure I understand the problem. Cheers, Sam Bayer |