Project Name

Ontologies for SOA

Project Status

Approved by the SOA Working Group.

Contribution to the Mission

The SOA Working Group contributes to the Open Group mission of Boundaryless Information Flow, by developing and fostering common understanding of SOA in order to facilitate alignment between the business and information technology communities. The Ontologies for SOA project will provide part of that contribution in the following specific ways. It will:

• More precisely define the concepts, terminology and semantics of SOA in both business and technical terms, in order to:
  • Create a foundation for further work in domain-specific areas,
  • Enable communications between business and technical people,
  • Enhance the understanding of SOA concepts in the business and technical communities, and
  • Provide a means to state problems and opportunities clearly and unambiguously to promote mutual understanding; and
• Potentially contribute to model-driven SOA implementation, which will facilitate SOA adoption.

Deliverables

The project will deliver formal ontologies containing definitions of SOA concepts and the relationships between them. These ontologies will incorporate where possible existing standard ontologies for SOA, and will relate them to concepts of particular importance to The Open Group, including the concepts identified by the SOA Working Group definition and modeling projects, and the concepts of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).

The ontologies will be designed for use by:

• Business people, to give them a deeper understanding of SOA, and its use in the enterprise;
• Architects, as metadata for architectural artefacts; and
• Architecture methodologists, as a component of SOA metamodels.

Inputs

Relevant work includes;

• Initiatives for ontology modelling on SOA, including specific work on web services such as SWSO, WSMO and OWL-S;
• Current Papers and University Initiatives, in particular the SOA-S project at the University of Innsbruck;
• The Federal EA Reference Models Ontology FEARMO), see: http://www.omg.org/docs/gov/05-11-06.ppt, www.osera.gov and http://www.topquadrant.com/tq_white_papers.htm;
• The OSERA project, see http://osera.modeldriven.org/;
• The OASIS SOA Reference model;
• The OMG Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM);
• The Architecture Forum terminology work;
• The TOGAF 8.1, 8.1.1, and 9 metamodels;

Working Procedures

The project will use RDF and OWL as ontology representation languages, and Protégé as tool.

A bibliography of relevant work will be kept up-to-date throughout the life of the project.

Project Leader

Chris Harding.

Project Team

The team is composed of the members of the soa-ontology mail list.

Project Plan

The project will include the following activities:

Project Approved	1 July 2006
Identify existing SOA and Web Services ontology work	17 July 2006
Establish liaison with Architecture Forum on TOGAF modeling work	17 July 2006
Produce first-cut top-level ontology based on work of SOA Definitions team	23 October 2006
First draft of scope of further work at more detailed level. (For example, define relation to specific domain ontologies.)	23 October 2006