Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Service-Oriented Modeling Based on Whole Process Asset Reuse
Authors	WU Bu-Dan1) JIN Zhi1),2) ZHAO Bin2)
Address	1)(Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190) 2)(Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190)
Year	2008
Issue	No.8(1393—1308)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract Service-oriented computing (SOC) is an emerging software architecture paradigm on Internet, which develops software by integrating services. Service-oriented modeling (SOM) is the essential task in SOC application development. On the one hand, like traditional software, service-oriented application also needs requirement modeling as the first principle step of its development process. On the other hand, distributed reuse and fast integrating in SOC ask distinctive features for service-oriented modeling. This paper proposes an extensive reuse approach for SOM, which utilizes a multi-facets ontology system supporting reuse of various SOA assets throughout the modeling process. The assets in hierarchical repositories are associated with the ontology system, which include application frames, business processes, collaboration templates, and services. The paper also presents an iterative modeling process, when new requirement comes up, ontology-guided reuse in each modeling phase is performed iteratively and finally a deployable service-oriented software model is obtained. Keywords service-oriented modeling； SOA assets； SOA asset reuse； ontology system Background This work is supported by the National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China under grant No.60625204, the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.60736015, and the National 863 High-tech Project of China under grant No.2006AA01Z155. Service-oriented computing represents the recent advancements in distributed computing and software development practice. SOC provides a way to align IT and business, it greatly facilitates the reuse of IT assets and provides agility to business processes. It is the demand for agility of business that drives the evolvement of SOC. Like traditional software, SOC also needs service-oriented modeling to capture the business requirements. Different from traditional modeling approaches such as OOAD and component-based modeling, service-oriented modeling extensively reuses services, business processes, workflows and collaborations. From a modeling and design point of view, service-oriented modeling emphasizes more on business level, that is, how to transform a business requirement to a service model. Some concerns have shifted from lower-level, infrastructural matters to deeper foundational topics such as analysis and modeling. However, most literatures apply traditional modeling technique such as OO and component-based modeling to SOM, which cannot solve substantial modeling problems in service-oriented computing and disobeys the soul of SOA. This paper proposes an ontology-based extensive reuse approach for SOM, which utilizes an ontology system supporting reuse of various SOA assets, such as application frames, business processes, collaboration templates, workflows and services. This approach works out a service model step by step from abstract to concrete. The paper also presents an iterative modeling process, when new requirement comes up, reuse in each ontology layer is performed iteratively and finally a deployable service model is obtained. As the authors have worked out in their former literature, ontology can capture semantics of services, not just syntax information. In this paper, the authors use environment ontology to describe function of SOA assets through effects assets can impose on environment. They extend their former work on environment ontology, and propose application ontology, collaboration ontology and service ontology corresponding to different abstraction layers in SOM to facilitate reuse of SOA assets in each modeling phase. Environment ontology provides a shared knowledge base for all the other three ontologies. This ontology system can greatly extend the reusability of service assets. Based on it, SOA assets can easily be compared, matched and reused.