EA - Enterprise Architecture in Action: The giant standard bodies say it again “SOA is not about technology but rather about the big “A” in SOA; i.e., Architecture”

by Murteza Salemi

OASIS, OMG, and The Open Group, the three largest standards bodies for SOA and Web services have collaborated on jointly publishing a new white paper called "Navigating the SOA Open Standards Landscape Around Architecture."

The significance about the paper is to reiterate the message that SOA is not about technology but rather the Architecture with big "A". The paper also outlines the agreement on core SOA concepts and terminologies which brings harmony and more or less coordination to these diverse concepts which are very similar in the essence.

There are a number of SOA-related specifications and standards that provide different explanations of the same concepts from different points of view. The white paper discusses main SOA ingredients and core elements such as SOA reference model, SOA reference architecture, maturity model, modeling languages, and governance. It emphasizes SOA as being a framework to be used by architects and SOA practitioners to devise solutions for specific industry and domain. Furthermore it discovers the similarities between the standards and specifications like the ones found between Open Group ontology and OASIS SOA reference model, though the terms used by these standard bodies may represent different architectural views.

The Open Group SOA ontology is similar of OASIS SOA reference model. The ontology defines concepts and vocabularies used in SOA context and elaborate on what they are and how the concepts and vocabularies relate to each other. The main goals are to support understanding of these terms and concepts within SOA setting, and potentially to lay the path for model driven development aka; MDD. The Open Group uses OWL (Web Ontology Language) to represent the Ontology and enable automation through tools that can process OWL. Reasoning applications can use OWL to match a service consumer against a service provider and run an impact analysis.

OASIS reference model is similar to Open Group ontology as it tries to promote a common understanding of SOA by providing an unambiguous and clear vocabulary. The reference model facilitates a conceptual framework that is common enough to be applied systematically and consistently across different SOA development projects. The common semantics remove unambiguities around SOA terms and concepts which help to clearly explain and elaborate on a specific SOA solution.

The paper specifically says: "The Open Group SOA Ontology and the OASIS Reference Model for SOA are very closely aligned, although some terms may represent different architectural views. The difference in expression or naming of concepts does not affect the basic understanding of SOA or the derivative architectures."

We are looking forward to seeing more of these initiatives as it will help us to speak and write in one language, SOA language.