An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

From i* models to service oriented architecture models

Requirements engineering and architectural design are key activities for successful development of software systems. Specifically in the service-oriented development systems there is a gap between the requirements description and architecture design and assessment. This article presents a systematic process for systematically deriving service-oriented architecture from goal-oriented models. This process allows generate candidate architectures based on i* models and helps architects to select a solution using services oriented patterns for both services and components levels. The process is exemplified by applying it in a synthesis metadata and assembly learning objects system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

A SOA-Based Framework for E-Procurement in Multi-Organisations

The lack of standard platform for application-to-application interaction between the procurement systems of subsidiary organisations of a multi-organisation limits transparency of procurement procedures, and uniformity in the procurement patterns and practices, even when there are cross-cutting concerns. In this paper, an SOA-based e-procurement framework is proposed for effective e-procurement in a multi-organisational context. The e-procurement framework leverages SOA's inherent capability for addressing problems of heterogeneity, interoperability and dynamic requirements. An empirical case study showed that the framework is effective for achieving the corporate goal of promoting transparency, and enhancing uniformity of corporate procurement management in a multi-organisational context

An interactive metaheuristic search framework for software serviceidentification from business process models

In recent years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model of computing has become widely used and has provided efficient and agile business solutions in response to inevitable and rapid changes in business requirements. Software service identification is a crucial component in the production of a service-oriented architecture and subsequent successful software development, yet current service identification methods have limitations. For example, service identification methods are either not sufficiently comprehensive to handle the totality of service identification activities, or they lack computational support, or they pay insufficient attention to quality checks of resulting services. To address these limitations, comprehensive computationally intelligent support for software engineers when deriving software services from an organisation’s business process models shows great potential, especially when the impact of human preference on the quality of the resulting solutions can be incorporated. Accordingly, this research attempts to apply interactive metaheuristic search to effectively bridge the gap between business and SOA technology and so increase business agility.A novel, comprehensive framework is introduced that is driven by domain independent role-based business process models, and uses an interactive metaheuristic search-based service identification approach based on a genetic algorithm, while adhering to SOA principles. Termed BPMiSearch, the framework is composed of three main layers. The first layer is concerned with processing inputs from business process models into search space elements by modelling input data and presenting them at an appropriate level of granularity. The second layer focuses on identifying software services from the specified search space. The third layer refines the resulting services to map the business elements in the resulting candidate services to the corresponding service components. The proposed BPMiSearch framework has been evaluated by applying it to a healthcare domain case study, specifically, Cancer Care and Registration (CCR) business processes at the King Hussein Cancer Centre, Amman, Jordan.Experiments show that the impact of software engineer interaction on the quality of the outcomes in terms of search effectiveness, efficiency, and level of user satisfaction, is assessed. Results show that BPMiSearch has rapid search performance to positively support software engineers in the identification of services from role-based business process models while adhering to SOA principles. High-quality services are identified that might not have been arrived at manually by software engineers. Furthermore, it is found that BPMiSearch is sensitive and responsive to software engineer interaction resulting in a positive level of user trust, acceptance, and satisfaction with the candidate services

A service-oriented approach to modeling and performance analysis of Port Community Systems:

A Port Community System (PCS) is an electronic platform that links the multiple systems operated by private and public organizations. Accordingly, PCSs can be interpreted as complex service system networks that coproduce services. The study proposes a three levels top-down methodology which aims to interpret existing PCS in order to: provide a formal description of this system network based on the enterprise architecture concepts of a PCS; illustrate how each actor of a PCS offers or requires services; and present a new approach to the measurement of services based on the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm

Validation of a Generic Service Governance Meta Model based on the Comparison of Major Governance Frameworks

The effective governance of organizational capabilities in the areas of Service Management and Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) has been broadly recognized as an essential success factor for service-oriented enterprises. Organizations that target the adoption of an adequate Service Governance approach face the difficulty of selecting from a variety of related frameworks with differing scopes and objectives. In this paper, we provide a structural comparison of the major, non vendor-specific IT and SOA Governance and Management frameworks and use this comparison to validate our own Service Governance meta model. This generic meta model is intended to provide a sound conceptualization, thereby contributing to a better understanding and facilitation of Service Governance, e.g. by forming the foundation for the development of a flexible and configurable Service Governance tool