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concepts in the service knowledge base. The set of detected concepts is then
used to annotate the respective Enterprise Service. The corresponding steps are
illustrated as dashed lines in Figure 1. Our prototypical implementation shows
that a majority of available Enterprise Services can be annotated automatically.
An evaluation of generated annotations in fact demonstrates a high degree of
completeness, accuracy and correctness.
In the remainder, we explain an example of SOA Governance in Section 2.
We then describe the service annotation framework in Section 3. In Section 4,
we present a solution and evaluate generated annotations in Section 5. Finally,
we refer to related work in Section 6 and provide a conclusion in Section 7.
2SOAGrnane
Organizations use SOA Governance to better manage their SOA development.
This has been ascertained by [16], predicting a considerably high risk of failures
for midsize to large SOA projects of more than 50 Web Services without any
applied SOA governance mechanism. Large companies such as SAP, IBM and
Oracle employ SOA Governance mechanisms to ensure a consistent, effective
and business aligned development of SOA-based applications. We refer to SOA
Governance as policies to make consistent decisions on how to build usable and
long-living services. SOA Governance, similar to IT Governance, typically covers
multiple phases of a service life-cycle, e.g. service planning, design, definition,
implementation etc. [10]. In terms of service design, developers are guided in
their task to create interfaces of future Enterprise Services. Governance applied
during the design phase typically encompasses guidelines and best practices to
effectively create services that are (ideally) mutually exclusive and exhaustive
regarding coverage of functionality. It also creates a common agreement and se-
mantic alignment of concepts used during the service development. For instance
”Sales Order” is a business entity defining a contractual order that is commonly
understood by developers, customers and partners across corporate boundaries.
2.1 SOA Governance - A Service Design Example
As a motivating example, we describe one possible way to abstract and utilize
information used as part of SAP's service development methodology for creating
Enterprise Services. Specifically the definition of Enterprise Service signatures
can be quite versatile, encompassing the use of multiple (i) concepts arranged by
some kind of (ii) naming convention [2,21]. We herein refer to concepts as
ter-
minological concepts
and to its instance data as
factual concepts
. The schema in
Figure 2 shows an example of such concepts as part of our definition of a
knowl-
edge base
. Particularly, the schema illustrates - but is not restricted to - the
application of two main terminological concepts: a domain-specific
data model
and service development
pattern
. We used RDF/S to describe the hierarchy of
both types of concepts in a single schema focusing only on a minimal example
of terminological concepts, i.e. data model and pattern, and naming conventions
used to describe Enterprise Services. We refer to the Enterprise Service (S1) as an
end-to-end example to illustrate used design principles as well as our approach:
