WS-CDL literature surveys

I've been on the program committees for too many conferences and workshops to keep count. You almost always see the expected bell-curve of paper submissions (5% are really bad, 90% are ok, and 5% are extremely good). But irrespective of the quality and content of a paper, the one thing that always annoys me is bad citations and references. I think this goes back to when we were doing the initial work around Arjuna and looking at how to leverage object-oriented techniques for fault tolerance. These days it'd be very passe, but back then it was the start of OO and the work we did was cutting edge. We weren't the only ones doing work in that area: there was Camelot/Avalon (later went on to become Encina from Transarc) and Argus (ISIS wasn't really about exploiting OO approaches). Whenever we ran into papers by those teams it was very rare to see them reference us, whereas the inverse was almost never the case (timing permitting). Frustrating to say the least. So I always try to ensure that accepted papers have appropriate references. It benefits the author's work as well as the reader (there's nothing more infuriating than reading a paper, asking yourself "OK, but how does this compare with XYZ?" and then finding that the author's don't mention it.)

What has this to do with WS-CDL? Well I'm on another PC (I won't mention which, though I have posted the CFP on the blog already) and recently received a swathe of papers on orchestration and choreography. All of them mentioned BPMN. Several of them mentioned BPEL. A couple of them mentioned Pi-calculus. None of them mentioned WS-CDL (or its predecessors)! Of those that mentioned Pi-calculus, they all duplicated the effort that has gone into CDL. Plus every single paper mentioned the importance of being "standards compliant". It's not as if it's hard to find a mention of CDL via google (try googling for 'choreography web services'): in the "good 'ol days" we used to wonder if the lack of references to Arjuna was down to the complexity of tracking journal and conference papers - this was before the WWW and in the relative infancy of the internet (oh cr*p, doesn't that make me sound old?!)

Why is it that these papers didn't even mention CDL once? I think it's a combination of factors including: poor research on the part of the authors', excellent publicity on the part of major vendors that CDL is a dead standard, and confusion around the relationship of CDL to BPEL. This does a disservice to the people who have worked on CDL over the years: it's an excellent body of work and brings value to the choreography arena both from a static (development) perspective as well as dynamic (runtime). Of course it's in the vendor's best interests to ignore WS-CDL when they've adopted WS-BPEL heavily, but these things are complimentary (in fact CDL compliments any orchestration implementation, so don't get hung up over the WS part of the name.) But for a researcher, it's not acceptable.

So if you're doing research into choreography (and/or orchestration) and are thinking of writing a paper, you need to look at WS-CDL. Even if it's only to compare and contrast with what you're going to do, it's important. (A cogent argument against it in favour of your own work is fine, as long as the literature survey is complete.) Otherwise you could be disappointed when your paper is rejected.