WS-BPEL Extension for People

Yesterday found a link on IBM developerWorks site to a white paper describing BPEL4People.
The white paper basically describes the need and scenarios to fit in human users into business processes described using BPEL. A specification to describe the syntax and semantics of BPEL4People is listed as forthcoming.
The white paper has been written by IBM and SAP. The list of authors shows that the document has been prepared by the german setups of both firms. Among the SAP authors is also Claus von Riegen, whom I met last year while I was in Germany, when he interviewed me for a position in his team based in Walldorf, which is where SAP is headquartered. I had a pretty enjoyable interview with him, which was all in german, which further pleased me that I could survive through a 60+ mins interview having spoken only german. I guess the outcome of this interview was positive, since a few weeks later I had a telephonic interview with his boss, but my oh my, was this interview terrible!! The interesting thing is that this telephonic interview was in english, but I just flunked it. It was as embarrasing as the first interview was exhilarating :-)

not going to norway

As I previously mentioned, a paper of mine was accepted at a workshop to be held in Norway. Now to attend, I had to get a travel grant approved from the HEC, which is the Higher Education Commission, and has a program under which a travel grant for international travel can be applied for.
HEC is, however, a government organisation, and works like a government organisation, as I found out. The meaning of this sentence should be obvious to those who live and work in developing countries. Put simply, it means that efficiency is not really a trait of a government organisation. As I have heard more cynical people say, the motto is not "how may I help you", rather "how may I obstruct you".
Whatever, my travel grant application is still under process, but given that the workshop is this week, I cannot attend. Therefore I wrote the workshop organiser informing him of my inability to attend. This also means that the visa fees I paid at the Norwegian embassy will go to waste, since even though my visa was approved, as I enquired on the phone, I will not be going to Islamabad to get it stamped on my passport. I think it is pretty clever of the european embassies to collect the fee (non-refundable) before even accepting the visa application.
When I applied for a german visa in 1998, the asked me to pay the fees only when they confirmed my visa would be granted. Not anymore.

captcha

If you don't know what a captcha is, read here. You might have come across it some time or another.

Robert Fisk in Baghdad

Robert Fisk of the Independent newspaper is writing from Baghdad these days. As always, his reports are worth reading. You can read them here.

web services transactions

The Web Services Transactions Specifications (the ones from IBM, BEA and Microsoft) have been updated. Read about them here.

englishized german

read today on Spiegel, a title:
"Sightseeing in der Münchner City" :-)

some research

A paper I wrote has been accepted at this workshop. The VLDB TES workshop is pretty good, and the PC members are well-known in the web services area. The reviews are brief, but good, in the sense that the weaknesses have been highlighted, which should allow me to narrow my focus on those areas.
The only bad thing is that the workshop is in about 3 weeks time, in Norway, and I have to get the funding approved for attending the workshop, and more importantly, to get the visa. Whether these things can be done in 3 weeks is still to be seen.

service-description.com

This is an interesting resource dedicated to service descriptions. This position paper on the site discusses some important points, e.g. it is not really possible to describe a non-functional property exactly without knowing the context provided by the service requestor.
There is a very long technical report also on this site, though I have yet to read it.