| Backgrounder: |
Anyone working in the IT industry over the past decade has been inundated with “service-speak” - Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services, Software as a Service (SaaS), Enterprise Service Bus… the list goes on and on. The problem has been that in this vast jumble of jargon, the industry has as yet failed to coalesce on a definition for the seemingly simple term “service”.
In December of 2006 John Dodd and I surveyed the industry looking for any kind of consensus in terms of meta models, reference architectures, etc1. Our research showed tremendous variance in the terminology across the major standards bodies. Our assertion at the time was that if the SOA community could coalesce around a language in a manner similar to what happened with UML in the mid to late ‘90s, that it would greatly facilitate SOA adoption.
In retrospect, the lack of consistency should not be surprising. The term service has many definitions in wide usage and these definitions, though close, are subtly different. Wiktionary.org has ten definitions for “service” as a noun and another three as a verb.
Needless to say, the industry is in dire need of a common set of terminology with which to not only talk about SOA but to facilitate the exchange of designs and specifications. Only through agreement on precise meanings can we truly realize the benefits of integration that have been a key driver behind services since the beginning. After all, service reuse is only possible if the provider and consumer agree on what they both mean by the term “service”. SoaML is meant to provide a rigorous definition of service-related terms and thereby form a foundation for dialog and common understanding in the service domain.
A Brief History of SoaML
CBDI began publishing guidance on service architectures and methodology back in 1999 and published our first article on service modeling in 20032. We later published a more formal service meta model (the SAE™ Meta Model) in October of 20063. We have since published version 2.0 of the meta model and created a UML profile for our members to enable UML tool support for SAE™. This meta model and the UML profile have each been downloaded thousands of times since being published.
Around the same time other members of the OMG also began to see a need for standards in this area and together we issued a Request for Proposal for a UML Profile and Meta model for SOA (UPMS) in September of 20064. Everware-CBDI and others including IBM, EDS, HP, and Model Driven Solutions (MDS) formed a submission team while several other organizations formed other submission teams to respond to the RfP.
Following the initial submission of proposals to UPMS RfP, the submission teams decided that rather than continuing to work on competing submissions, it would be more productive to join forces and create a joint submission, working out differences within the team rather than requiring the Task Force to choose one submission over the others.
This was not a simple process. All members brought some notion of the service concepts to the table and wanted their notion to be accepted as the standard. Of the organizations involved, IBM and Everware-CBDI represented the largest "installed base" - IBM with their service profile in RSM/RSA and Everware-CBDI with the SAE™ Meta Model and UML profile. In addition, the team looked closely at the OASIS Reference Model and tried to be consistent where possible. Unfortunately, the OASIS Reference Model turned out to be inconsistent and more of a high level conceptual model rather than a rigorous practitioner’s model.
|
Home