Folks,
FYI...
- JAE
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: The Open Group SOA Ontology
Hello, Jeff -
At 23:57 01/08/2008, Jeffrey A. Estefan
wrote:
Hello
Chris, I have made a first cut draft at
capturing the set of working definitions used for principal and supporting
concepts in the respective SOA standard work of OASIS (OASIS Reference Model
for SOA - SOA-RM & Reference Architecture for SOA - SOA-RA), the OMG
(SOA-Pro submission to UML Profile and Metamodel for Services (UPMS) RFP, and
The Open Group SOA Ontology. Please see the attached Word
document. If you have any trouble opening it, please let me
know. This looks to be a very useful
comparison! Do you intend to publish it, in due course? If so, and if it is
available before we publish the ontology, the ontology could reference it. If
not, would you have a problem with us including material from it, with due
acknowledgement, as an appendix to the ontology?
Ideally, we'd like to
see every cell in the table filled in. Again, I stress, this is a first
draft. Feel free to update any cells for the SOA Ontology column that
I've missed. I'll go through it in detail and send you
comments.
Also, could you
provide the current version number of the SOA Ontology and publication date of
that revision? This would be the one you sent to the OASIS SOA-RA
editors and to our TC Chair, Duane Nickull. That way, I can update the
table entry accordingly. I took the date from the PDF properties file so
I don't know if this is accurate.
The ontology has not
yet been published. We hope to publish in Q4 of this year. What is on the web
currently is a draft for comment. It is identified as Draft 2.0.
We have a couple
of volunteers on the SOA-RA team who are going through the SOA Ontology and
that will roll up into an official OASIS response hopefully in the next couple
of weeks.
That's great!
In the meantime,
rest assured that we fill having an industry standard SOA ontology represented
in OWL or other industry standard representation is a very good thing.
What we are mostly concerned with is alignment of at least the core SOA
concepts; specifically, the definition of "Service." It is very
important that we (the key Open Stds organizations of OASIS, OMG, and The Open
Group) collectively harmonize on some of the core SOA concepts; otherwise, we
will all be doing the practitioner and business stakeholder community at large
a huge disservice.
I agree that we need compatibility. We
should recognise, though, that different viewpoints often produce different
definitions. For example, London can be defined, from a political point of view,
as "the capital of the UK" and, from a geographical point of view, as "the
lowest crossing point on the river Thames." Both definitions are equally valid,
and equally useful (and the connection between them is interesting to
historians). We shouldn't try to force everyone touse the same
definition.
An effort to
standardize on such core concepts was ratified back in Oct 2006 by OASIS and
that is the OASIS Reference Model for SOA. The Open Group SOA Ontology
does cite this resource and does utilize some key concepts such as Effects and
Contracts & Policies, but again, having a divergent definition of
"Service" for example, is probably not a good thing.
We
had a project at around the same time to develop a definition of SOA, and have
based our work on what it came up with. I don't think that the Open Group and
OASIS definitions are incompatible, but they are from slightly different
viewpoints.
You are probably
aware of the SOA-Pro submittal from the OMG by now, but in case you have not
seen it, you can download a copy at the following
URL: http://www.omg.org/docs/ad/08-05-03.pdf I would like to point your attention to Annex B starting on page 98 of
that draft standard, which shows conformance to the OASIS SOA-RM. It
would be very helpful to have a similar Annex as part of The Open Group SOA
Ontology. As my attached table shows, we will likely all have varying
degrees of definitions to are concepts, but again, I think it's key that we at
least line up on the very core, principal concepts with somewhat minor
variation. There are additional supporting concepts that the SOA-Pro
does a very good job that those of us on the SOA-RA Subcommittee are taking a
hard look at for possible adoption. Similarly, your SOA Ontology
introduces the notion of "Activity," which is missing in our SOA-RA work and
we will be looking at that key concept as well in development of the
SOA-RA.
We have a particular understanding of conformance
in The Open Group, based on our experience of defining and operating
certification programs over many years. We use the term "conformance" in
relation to products and standards, rather than in relation to models (or
ontologies) and other models. But an analysis of the relation between the
ontology and the OASIS RM, as you have started in your document, is very
helpful.
I think I've
rambled on enough. Please feel free to share this information with your
respective SOA Working Group colleagues. If you have any questions,
please feel free to drop me a line.
Thanks! I'm
forwarding this to our ontology project team.
Regards... -
Jeff A. Estefan, Jet Propulsion
Laboratory Office: (818) 393-5280, Fax: (818) 393-0028 Email: Jeffrey.A.Estefan@jpl.nasa.gov Voting Member, OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture
Technical Committee Voting Member, OASIS Reference Architecture for Service
Oriented Architecture Subcommittee Voting Member, OASIS Service Component
Architecture - Assembly Technical
Committee
Regards,
Chris ++++
======================================================================== Dr.
Christopher J. Harding Forum Director for SOA and Semantic
Interoperability THE OPEN GROUP Thames Tower, 37-45 Station Road, Reading
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