Maintaining the Core – Service Repository - Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform - page 314

Open standards for the SOA taxonomy
Generally, we have two sets of public standards: Repository and Registry. Open Group
came up with a wide range of standardization initiatives, of which two can be very benefi-
cial to us:
• The SOA Governance Technical Standard (including the SOA Governance Refer-
ence Model (SGRM))
• The SOA Ontology Technical Standard
The Governance Reference model covers all aspects of the Enterprise SOA lifecycle and,
naturally, all ontology features. One of the aspects covered is service harvesting, which is
the third principle after service reuse and service description. We learned that it will give us
little without the first two principles. Therefore, service metadata is the main element of the
service description to support service reuse, one of the main SOA principles to maintain.
There is a plethora of material on the SGRM standard for organizing projects, implement-
ing change requests, and establishing and monitoring KPIs. However, in the context of this
chapter, references to ontology are most important to us. A detailed presentation of the cur-
rent version of Open Group's service ontology is provided on the organization's website,
and we recommend that you take a close look at the two main diagrams on the introduction
page, the ER diagram and hierarchy drawing—the entire ontology is graphically presented
in these two forms. They are definitely something we could use for our OER taxonomy
design, so review the diagrams intently.
Tip
Remember that these public standards are constantly under development. Conduct your
own Web Ontology Language (OWL) studies ( http://www.opengroup.org/soa/ontology/
20101021/soa.owl ) at the moment of publication.
When studying the hierarchy, we cannot help but notice several aspects that might be cru-
cial to the acceptance of this ontology as the basis for agnostic composition controller im-
plementation:
• On the SGRM page, the first guiding principle is "SOA Governance must promote
the alignment of business and IT". This is effective indeed and has always been
one of the goals (an objective, not a principle) of SOA. Please look at Chapter 1 ,
SOA Ecosystem - Interconnected Principles, Patterns, and Frameworks , again in
which we discussed principles, goals, good wishes, common sense, and what sep-
arates them. Nevertheless, this statement rightfully promotes Process as the key