You might not consider it to be that big a deal, but it can be. SOA software design is being pushed forward as the solution to all of life’s ills. But there are some very real challenges that need to be considered first.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software design promises to populate the world’s networks with many small, lightweight, reusable programs that can automatically combine to perform a vast range of services. This will allow simple functions to unite to perform complicated tasks. But a major challenge exists.

That challenge is how to find a robust, efficient and economical way to introduce all these tiny programs to each other, and to alert other programs of their function. Or as Dr Dominik Kuropka, scientific coordinator of the IST-funded Adaptive Services Grid (ASG) project, puts it: “How can we represent the functionality of real world services in a way that computers can deal with it?”

ASG has implemented a reference platform for semantic service provision. Their platform is possibly the first to show that software can autonomously combine functions to achieve some overall goal. The team developed two sample services, booking a visit to a tourist attraction and automated supply chain management, to validate their system.

Part of that work was to develop a way to represent, in a way machines could understand, the function of each service, such as booking, payment and so on. This is important. Services must be able to advertise their own function, and discover the function of other services.

It enables software to combine and execute independently, without human intervention. A flight service, for example, must be able to understand what a payment service is for before it can invoke it to execute the credit card charge…. Souce: IST Results