Method Engineering: A Service-Oriented Approach - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 337

In method engineering, using an ontology of method presents four main advan-
tages:

• It supports semantic description of method services . This ontology provides

primitives in terms of which a service provider can describe method services .

• It supports request formulation. This ontology defines a vocabulary in terms of

which service consumers can ask service needs.

• It supports the research and composition of method services with a high degree

of automation.

• It reduces the gap between service description available in the service base and

consumer's requirements on the service base. In SO2M, the ontology of method
provides a common vocabulary which can be used both by the “providers” and
the “requesters” of services.

5 The Model of Method Service

This section briefly defines major concepts used in method service specification.
The description of a method service contains three parts (see Fig. 3) : an identifica-
tion part, a process part and a resource part. A service delivers a process to achieve a
certain goal by using resources. The three parts express service knowledge at differ-
ent abstraction levels: the identification part emphasizes the development problem
that the service solves, the process part characterizes a manner to solve the problem
and the resource part provides a reusable process fragment. Identification and pro-
cess parts aim at describing method services in order to enable the automation of
method services discovery and composition.

Fig. 3 Method service
specification

Method service
Identification part
(goal)

Method service

Process part
(process structure)
Resource part
(reusable process)

5.1 The Identification Part

This part defines the purpose of the service. Our approach for designing services
is based on a “customer” point of view. So the identification part contains the con-
textual knowledge of the customer and why the customer (i.e. the developer) takes
advantages in using services. Identification part (see Fig. 4) is largely used dur-
ing discovery and selection of method services . The identification part contains two
kinds of knowledge: finality and argument.