Thursday, October 02, 2008

Versions and Schema Semantics in SOA Composite Services

As part of your SOA governance efforts, it is not sufficient to handle just the versioning of the services and the data schemas used by the services. You must also govern the semantics of the data to enable service composability. Composite services are not possible without semantic data integration.

There are
two information models in play when composing services - just as there are two different, but related, process models involved in service-oriented solutions. One is the well known common information model (CIM), the other is the related business event message model used to enable semantic business process composition.


The process composition information should be partitioned according to the business process domains to allow for the business process information model (BPIM) to evolve independent of each other. Design the BPIM based on the CIM, ensuring that the model is canonical for each process domain. Your BPIM must be federated even if evolved and versioned separately, to enable semantic data mediation and semantic business process integration.

The BPIM contains metadata that models business event messages as projections of CIM data entities. A business process message typically contains a subset of one or more domain objects. E.g. in an order handling system, the real-world event "customer submits order" is a projection of the customer, address, credit and product entities from the CIM. Think classical paper-based mail order schemas or the Excel schemas you use to get your travel expences reimbursed, or rather the form used to apply for a vacation.

Creating an enterprise canonical data model might be feasible, but federated domain models are recommended. You would anyway need to mediate semantics between your system and third-party services that you involve, or on parts of your processes that you chose to outsource.Federated models are required for B2x integrations as you cannot easily enforce your model on the outside world. Using a CDM might work in a centrally controlled EAI hub, but most likely not across departments, organizational and partner boundaries in an extended enterprise.

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