I’m a little late getting back to this. I met with my advisor a few weeks ago to redefine my research topic. It’s still within the same general area (composing services into workflows), but it’s more tightly scoped. Given how late in the semester it is already, I’m concentrated on re-writing my proposal right now. All in all, I feel a little better about the redefined topic; I think it will be easier to produce something workable, even if it wouldn’t be quite as cool as my original idea.