Because service types are passed when the hand shacking between two clients occurs, it seems that it would, theoretically, be possible to call a service from rospy without specifying the topic name: rospy.ServiceProxy('myservice')(myparam=1) The internal rospy mechanics could import the correct service depending on the type. In fact, is it really necessary to specify the python service class if a user doesn't particularly care what the service type is? Not having to declare a service type could reduce the number of explicit imports in a python code, and potentially make python code independent of the types. I guess this argument would also apply to the subscribers of topics.. rosen,