Light-Weight Semantic Integration of Generic Behavioral Component Descriptions
Jens Lemcke · IGI Global eBooks · 2010
As stated by the Aberdeen group, integration costs 40% of a company’s IT budget today. The difficulty of integration arises because the description of software components–in service-oriented architectures (SOA) predominantly done by XML schema definition (XSD) and the Web service definition language (WSDL)–is on the technical level. The technical description neglects important detail of the intended usage of software components, which is also referred to as their semantics. Particularly, semantics needs to be considered in two major integration tasks. First, semantically corresponding data types that can be used for communication between components need to be identified. Second, natural language documentation needs to be studied today in order to understand component behavior, that is, dependencies between operation invocations and how semantically different outcomes of operation calls are represented in the technical output format. The approach presented in this chapter supports the two tasks as follows. First, closed frequent itemset mining (CFIM) is employed to help identifying semantically corresponding data types. Second, a formal representation for component behavior is introduced. However, as component behavior is specified during component development, but used during integration–two distinct phases involving distinct teams–we provide model transformations to ensure the consistent transfer of generic behavioral information to specific integration constraints before automated integration techniques can be applied. We applied the CFIM on the message types exposed by SAP’s standard software components and show that we are able to find semantically relevant correspondences. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our behavioral model transformations on the basis of an SAP best practice business scenario. With the little more effort to specify behavioral information at development time in a formal way instead of in natural language, our approach facilitates the reuse of behavioral component descriptions in multiple integration projects and eases the construction of correct integrations.