The Open Group's SOA Source Book is a collection of source material for use by enterprise architects working with Service-Oriented Architecture.

It consists of material that has been considered and in part developed by The Open Group's SOA Working Group. The SOA Working Group is engaged in a work program to produce definitions, analyses, recommendations, reference models, and standards to assist business and information technology professionals within and outside of the Open Group to understand and adopt SOA. The source book does not represent the final output of that work program, which will be published as a collection of Open Group Standards and Guides. It is an interim publication, and its content will not necessarily be reflected in the final output.

The material reflects input from a large number of people from a wide range of Open Group member companies, including product vendors, consultancies, and users of SOA. In some cases, these people have brought concepts developed, not just by themselves, but by groups of people within their organizations. The input has been refined and further developed through discussion within the Working Group. The value in the result is due to the ideas and efforts of the Working Group members.

The material is now published in its current form to make that value available to the wider architecture community.

Edition 1 of the book is available in English here, and in Japanese from The Open Group Japan website.

Edition 2 is now available in English on the web, and supersedes the English version of Edition 1.

You can obtain a hard copy of Edition 1 of the SOA Source Book from Van Haren Publishing.