December 20, 2010 – Rumor has it the Open Group’s SOA Work Group intends the new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Ontology Technical Standard to be a semantic foundation for SOA terms and concepts.
SearchSOA.com is the source of the article titled, “‘Ontology’ is the word: A foundation for SOA semantics,” that provided the inspiration for this post. Despite the best efforts of many, people are still divided by differing uses of common terms. Routinely used words like “service,” “component,” “system,” “task,” and so on, and how those terms relate to each other, can have varied meaning depending on who or what product or tool is doing the defining. The SOA Work Group said the ontology is designed to be used by business people, architects and developers. The SOA Ontology is apparently intended for use with other industry standards as well, like the Oasis Group’s SOA Repository Artifact Model & Protocol (S-RAMP).
According to Claus Jensen, a contributor to the standard and chief architect for SOA-BPM-EA technical strategy at IBM, “it’s up to all vendors to say that over time if [their] products will evolve to be semantically compliant.”
The SOA Ontology Technical Standard is available free of charge from the Open Group website.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
