Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: cory-c@enterprisecomponent.com

Name: Cory Casanave
Title: President
Organization: Data Access Technologies
Regarding Specification:SOA-RM v1.0

The SOA RM provides a good perspective of SOA at the level of an individual technical service but does not live up to the stated goal of services in general as expressed in the document "Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains."

In particular, services (as described in the document) need to be put into the context of a community that is benefiting from a set of interactions.  It is that community that is the reason for the service, provides it context, definition and business value.  As the contract of a single interaction between parties in such a community, the service can only be understood when the set of services within that community are defined as a set, where the interdependences, timing, responsibilities are well understood.  This is the “Architecture” in SOA.

By way of example, Oasis’s UBL specification [http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/], section 5.1 shows such a community of “buyer”, “seller”, “Delivery Recipient”.  This community exists for the common business purpose of commerce and will be instrumented by various actors playing the roles of this community using service interfaces.  The definition and realization of such communities with service interfaces should be at the heart of an SOA reference model.

The heart of SOA is in defining such communities, the roles actors may play and the interactions between them that both enable the community and encapsulate the business activities underneath.  This is not a new idea, A design model for such communities is expressed in the OMG-EDOC “Component Collaboration Architecture” [http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?formal/2004-02-01] which has been applied to both e-Government and e-Enterprise applications, such as the U.S. General Service Administrations enterprise architecture.

In summary or feedback is that the reference model should express a higher level of architecture that encompasses communities and how actors interact in roles of that community to achieve a business purpose.  This should then be related to the more granular expression of service interfaces, which are the focus of the current document.