Over the past two months, there has been a vetting of the issues, in a most
complete fashion in the CIO Council's SOA CoP e-forum. (01)
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AnnouncementofSOACoP (02)
The core assumption that we, forum members, make is that the marketplace
already has SOA deployment examples, from which the SOA CoP would like to
stand up a transparent and simple example, so as to make clear SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) principles. (03)
But in real life, SOA principles vary and the variations lead into
technology dependant implementations. Once dependant on a specific
technology/standard or a specific specification then it is often the case
that government interest in a specific technology/standard will have, de
facto, selected a winner. Historical evidence may be that RDF/OWL was so
selected over Topic Maps (in the period 1999 - 2001). (04)
However, our forum (SAO CoP) has properly vetted the issue of fairness to
alternatives. (I claim.) (05)
The participants of the SOA CoP forum understands our core assumption about
(US federal) government interest in a common, simnple example/demostration
of SOA principles. There is a recomendation (copied below) that an
agreement be made that the simplest SOA be specified so that that
specification can be demonstrated/simulated. I second that recomendation. (06)
A demo should be developed in accordance with your suggestions (as you have
the greatest understanding of these active in this discussion, with valued
input from Andrew and Joe.) (07)
Additional recomendation: (08)
I suggest, on behalf of myself and others, that a SOA CoP subcommittee also
be formed with the mission to map out the possible future developments in
the SOA and ontology mediated SOA domains. This subcommittee should have a
separate forum and should be futures oriented. (09)
The "futures of SOA" forum would focus on "beyond the horizon" efforts....
and would be supported by a wiki. (010)
We propose that the Federal (US) CIO Council provide (1) a wiki, (2)
visibility to the forum, (3) exposure to results (presentations) developed
by forum groups; so that we might be able to develop a forward looking
exposure of what is "next". (011)
Valid topics would be (012)
1) SOA implementation methodology
2) compatibility between standards supporting SOA
3) XML acceleration techniques, marshaling and un-marshaling techniques
4) ontology interface to orchestration and service discovery
5) community and individual visualization of conceptualization of service
webs (013)
In a standad e-forum, such as this one (SOA CoP), it is difficult to
preserve the knowledge exchanged by individuals, but the wiki resource could
do this. (014)
Several members, of the SOA CoP forum, have been working on a wiki
architecture that starts out by seeding a "shell" wiki with a set of
phrases/terms and then allowing members to make modifications to the
information on each page. Alternative viewpoints could be exposed along
with the mainstream viewpoints. A core team would have editing capability
until the wiki is stable, and then the wiki is made available for open
editing. (015)
(A spec on this wiki based conceptualization of a domain of discourse is
being prepared.) (016)
If we can agree to the OASIS BCM as the fondational methdology standard,
this would be helpful. But comments and viewpoints regarding BCM should be
asked for and discussed. (017)
www.businesscentricmethodology.com (018)
The OASIS TC working on a SOA methodology (Business Centric Methodology)
produced a model having four layers, the bottom one being
"conceptualization". A CIO Council sponsored "futures of SOA" wiki could
have as its mission the development of the community conceptualizations
about SOA, now and into the future. (019)
This might be done with less effort than in producing a demo, and when done
in parallel to producing a demo would allow the community (the federal space
in particular) to see the demo and to also see the first part of a
methodology guiding (020)
1) conceptualization
2) the formation of a common substrate for description of "services" within
a community
3) the issues related to "extension" from some existing "service web" to new
or other "service webs"
4) the (finally) informed implementation efforts needed for extending or
establishing for the first time membership within an evolving and dynamic
"service web". (021)
So in summary: I do not feel a need to question the specifics of any demo
that the active participants of the SOA CoP forum wish to define. The issues
have been fully vetted. (022)
I am proposing that the CIO Council sponsor and give exposure to a "futures
of SOA: eforum AND wiki. (023)
this email is posted also at: (024)
http://www.secondschool.net/beads/communityCentric/home.htm (025)
-----Original Message-----
From: soa-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:soa-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Cory Casanave
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 6:28 AM
To: 'Service-Oriented Architecture CoP'
Subject: RE: [soa-forum] Next level (026)
Paul,
One of the business requirements I would assert for the demo is that;
* participating in the community should have minimal entry barrier.
If we require an approach and technology that is to far out of the
mainstream, regardless of how interesting, that barrier is high.
Interestingly this is true even for an approach that may be intended to
lower that barrier should it become popular (which is how I would
characterize your recommendation). As you know form other threads, I also
have an interest in some of these other approaches (including ontologies)
but don't see it as appropriate as a REQUIRED element for the demo. (027)
My hope for the demo is that we could get participation of application users
or vendors - say SAP or Oracle. They would be able to look at the demo spec
and immediately see they could provide the integration points into their
application and "play". This, today, means that it would be best to utilize
something very close to ws-* as the integration technology and not REQUIRE
anything "to far" outside their experience and current technical
capabilities. While this is somewhat subjective as you suggest, I think we
all have a reasonable idea of where that line is. (028)
Note that I am not that much of a fan of ws-* and have no vested interest in
it (I have more vested interest in being technology independent). My
interest in ws-* is that it has become supported by most systems. Using WS
as the technology platform is purely a conclusion based on the hat I am
wearing of trying to get a compelling SOA demo going that will attract other
participants and interest business stakeholders. It is also a conclusion
that will most probably be reached by someone sponsoring a real community. (029)
The same is true of the MDA approach, it should not be required. There
should be (and will be) a set of technology specific artifacts that a web
service implementer could pick up and use/implement with no MDA magic. What
can be shown as an ADDED BENEFITS of MDA is that the same logical model can
also be implemented on other technologies (such as ebXML or
XML(Atom/1.0+custom vocabulary)) and expressed in different ways (including
as an ontology). An additional added benefit is automation of producing
such solutions. But, that is what an MDA participant will show - it is not
required to participate. Perhaps you could do the same for your approach. (030)
So what I am suggesting is that we leverage the huge investment that has
been made to support the web services stack by almost every vendor and show
how that can be utilized to support a SOA community. In doing so we should
make it clear that WS is a technology choice, it is not required for SOA.
Participants would be free, of course, to demonstrate the advantage of other
or additive technology choices but would probably also want to implement the
specified web services to show they can also play with the community's
current chosen technology. Do we have consensus on this? (031)
-Cory (032)
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