Service Oriented Architectures in the Delivery of Capability
Duncan J. Russell, Jie Jeff Xu · 2007
Service oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming established in computing as a means to integrate processing and access data across organisations. In general architecture terms, services are used to loosely couple assets in systems by describing service interfaces at a high level of abstraction. The abstract service descriptions are independent of the different service implementations, which are instantiated by the assets. Dynamic integration of assets can be captured using the service interface descriptions, which promotes loose coupling by only ‘binding’ to service implementations when needed. For Network Enabled Capability (NEC), services can be integrated to provide executable capability. Service descriptions need to be rich enough to enable mission planning and evaluation of architecture. The descriptions also need to be high-level enough to give the means to evalute and improve the dependability of supplied services by making assets interchangeable and evolvable to fulfill continuous delivery of capability. This paper proposes that extending service descriptions in SOA in terms of functional and non-functional attributes of assets can improve dependability in achieving delivery of capability.