Service Oriented Architecture

Reference Model
An informal SOA Ontology

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 Reference Model
• An abstract framework for understanding
significant relationships among the entities of
some environment.
• Consists of a minimal set of unifying
concepts, axioms and relationships within a
particular problem domain.
• Is independent of specific standards,
technologies, implementations, or other
concrete details.
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Reference Model

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Service Oriented Architecture
• Service Oriented Architecture is a
paradigm for organizing and utilizing
distributed capabilities that may be
under the control of different ownership
domains.
• Goal of this reference model is to define
the essence of Service Oriented
Architecture
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 Why Service Oriented
Architecture?
• Drivers:
• Large scale Enterprise systems
• Internet scale provisioning of services
• Reduce the cost of doing business
• Benefits
• Build scalable, evolvable systems
• Scalable because minimizes assumptions
• Manage complex systems
• Encourage re-use of business function
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 Why is it different?
• SOA reflects the reality of ownership
boundaries
• CORBA, RMI, COM, DCOM, etc. all try to
implement transparent distributed systems
• Ownership is of the essence in SOA
• SOA is task oriented
• Services are organized by function
• Getting something done
• SOA is inspired by human organizations
• It worked for us, it should work for machines
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 What is not in the RM
• Service composition
• Choreography, orchestration
• Process Oriented Architecture
• Organizational framework
• Who is doing what to whom
• Specific technologies
• not even specific architectures

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Key concepts

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 Service
• A mechanism to enable access to
one or more capabilities
• using a prescribed interface
• consistent with constraints and
policies as specified by the service
description.

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 Visibility
Visibility is the relationship between
service participants that is satisfied
when they are able to interact with
each other

• Awareness
• Service description
• Discovery
• Willingness
• Policy & contract
• Reachability
• Communication
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 Interaction
Interacting with a service involves performing actions against the service

The extent to which one system can

effectively interpret information from
another system is governed by the
semantic engagement of the
various systems.
The semantic engagement of a
system is a relationship between the
system and information it may
encounter.

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 Real World Effect
The purpose of using a capability is to realize one or more real world effects.
At its core, an interaction is “an act” as opposed to “an object” and the
result of an interaction is an effect (or a set/series of effects).

The real world effect is couched

in terms of changes to the state shared by
the participants and stakeholders in
a service interaction

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About Services

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 Conditions and Expectations

• Policy
• Constraint representing the
intention of a participant in a
service
• Contract
• Constraint representing an
agreement between two or
more participants.
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 Description
The service description
represents the information
needed in order to use,
manage or provide a
service.

• Service reachability
• Service Functionality
• Service Policies
• Service Interface

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 Execution Context
The execution context is the set of infrastructure elements,
process entities, policy assertions and agreements that are
identified as part of an instantiated service interaction,
and thus forms a path between those with needs and those
with capabilities

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 Is a Reference Model an
Ontology?
• Establishing a vocabulary
• A lot of definitions
• The RM glossary has 28 entries
• Formality was considered
• Audience is not formal
• Mechanical processing of RM not expected

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 What about UML
• UML obvious choice for an architecture
spec
• But,
• Inheritance (is-a) relationship almost never
used
• Extraneous precision
• E.g. we tried to define Service, not count the
number of service providers
• It’s so ugly <duck/>
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An early concept map

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 Concepts Maps
Concepts maps
were excellent
graphical indices
to text

Concepts, and
relationships.
All we needed 20
On the cutting-room floor…

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 Where we are
• Committee Specification published
• Reference Architecture effort started

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm
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