Re: [ontolog-forum] The Open Group SOA Ontology

["Toby Considine" <tobyconsidine@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Duane. The recommendation to read the OASIS SOA RM is a good one for many groups,; I have shared that document with dozens personally and with perhaps hundreds through e-distribution in the last months.

I am sorry to have implied that there was no difference; I was pushing back on the statement in of Ed's (that I just re-read and see that he did not embrace either)., that SOA was hype w/o meaning.

My writing must have been unclear. I said like OO *except*, with the except being the important part. By invoking OO, I meant to suggest that while SOA in many ways creates the notion of software architecture, making it imeaningful in a way it was nto before, that some of the core values it represents are well acknoweldged uncontroversial elements, in particular encapsulation, modularity, and polymorphism. If you want to stir in some Service Component Architecture (SCA), I suppose you can add in inheretance as well.

SOA of course has several aspects: chiselling out services from existing legacy monoliths, [re]designing systems for re-use without redevelopment, and formalizing and abstracting interactions with 3rd parties. It is the last that most interests me, and the one that will continue to benefit the most as SSOA (semantic SOA) slowly gets incorporated into mainstream SOA.

The 3rd party services, as well as moving beyond the single supplier of objects, push the developer toward agent-based approaches rather than object based. Agents are non-deterministic as they must defend their own missions not merely respond to remote pokes, whether those pokes are batch imports, REST or even fully elaborated WS-* compliant SOAP.

Internet scale systems will never be deterministic, not even internet scale control systems (which was part of an actual position title at IBM a few years back). Agents, with local automomy, will provide services in response to requests. *Those* conversations will drive API to semantics to ontology.

tc

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:44 AM, Duane Nickull <dnickull@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Toby:

I would consider this not quite true.  Service oriented architecture is a paradigm for architecture (software or otherwise), that matches needs and capabilities across multiple domains of ownership.  This makes it substantially different from OO which is typically under one environment and one domain of ownership.

You may wish to take the OASIS SOA RM work and read it.  It is quite compact (about 25 pages) and is the main standard in the SOA space.

Duane

On 16/07/08 8:04 PM, "Toby Considine" <tobyconsidine@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

SOA at some level is nothing more than OO writ big (nothing new there!) except with agent concepts (Agents are objects that are autonomous) except somehow, from all the small quantitative changes, something new has emerged, in the hands of careful practitioners, separated from the hype.

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