Method Engineering: A Service-Oriented Approach - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 345

process. In this context, the ontology of method would get rich dynamically. During
service design and request formulation, new terms could be added to the ontology in
order to extend knowledge on methods through the community. In this way, knowl-
edge on methods can be shared by “consumers” and “providers” of services through
the use of internet based communication technologies.
The need to develop service request languages suitable for IS developers require-
ments. A service request language and its appropriate run-time support environment
is required to allow IS developers to express their needs on the basis of the charac-
teristics and functionality of standard methods whose services are found in service
registries. A service request language must provide a formal means of describ-
ing desired method attributes and functionality, including both method preferences
and practice of the consumer (IS developer) and context and constraints of the
project.
The need to address service composition at the semantic level . One of the most
challenging areas in method engineering is the process of combining and aggre-
gating several method fragments in order to construct new method fragments. In
service-oriented computing, efforts have been made aiming at developing syntactic
techniques to automatically compose different services. We argue that goal orienta-
tion as a fundamental principle in service specification must be considered as a key
concept to address service composition at the semantic level. In method engineering,
this kind of composition would help to design new methods more systematically.

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