A standard protocol is needed to integrate work providers, asynchronous
services, across the intranet/internet and provide for their 
interaction. The integration and interactions consist of control and 
monitoring of the work.  Control means creating the work, setting up the 
work, starting the work, stopping the work, being informed of 
exceptions, being informed of the completion of the work and getting the 
results of the work  Monitoring means checking on the current status of 
the work and getting a history of the execution of the work. The 
protocol should be light weight and easy to implement, so that a variety 
of devices and situations can be covered.

The Simple Workflow Access Protocol is a proposed way to solve this 
problem through use of HTTP protocol, and by transferring structured 
information encoded in XML.  A new set of HTTP methods is defined, as 
well as the information to be supplied and the information returned in 
XML, that accomplish the control of generic asynchronous services.  This 
has applicability to workflow because a workflow is itself an 
asynchronous service, and it also has the need to be able to call 
asynchronous services outside of itself.

This BOF will introduce a strawman draft of the SWAP protocol and
discuss the goals behind the work.  It will attempt to gauge whether
the goals are appropriate for IETF, and if so, whether there is
interest within IETF in forming a working group to develop and
standardize such a protocol.