Skip to main content

SOA Source Book

The Open Group 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 SOA Work Group. The SOA Work 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 includes the final output of that work program, which is also published separately as a collection of Open Group Standards and Guides, available from The Open Group online bookstore. It also includes interim material, reflecting the current state of work that has not yet resulted in formal Standards and Guides. The content of this material will not necessarily be reflected in the final output.

This is Edition 7 of the SOA Source Book. Edition 1, published by Van Haren in April 2009, and also available on the web, contained interim material only. Since it appeared, The Open Group has published five SOA Standards, two SOA Guides, and three SOA White Papers. These have been included in successive editions of the Source Book as they appeared, replacing much of the original interim material.

Two of the Open Group SOA standards – the SOA Reference Architecture and the SOA Ontology – were input to ISO to assist with the development of the International Standard SOA Reference Architecture, ISO/IEC 16384. The Open Group SOA Reference Architecture is now superseded by ISO/IEC 16384:2016, and the reader is encouraged to use the ISO Standard. The Open Group SOA Reference Architecture is included in this edition of the Source Book for reference purposes.

Edition 7 contains:

The material in the SOA Source Book 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 Work Group. The value in the result is due to the ideas and efforts of the Work Group members.

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