A Disclosure Framework for Service Accountability in SOA

Accountability has become a key concern for management in recent years since the collapse of several large corporations in energy, communications and financial consulting industries. Traditionally, accountability has not been a significant concern in the IT literature. Recently, some protocols, models and frameworks that address certain aspects of accountability have emerged. However, an architecture framework that addresses the overall accountability requirements is nonetheless missing in a service-oriented computing environment. In this paper, we review the accountability literature in an IT context and argue that disclosure, as a crucial requirement of accountability, has been largely ignored in the current literature. Based on this proposition, we propose a new architectural framework to address the important disclosure requirement that extends and integrates the existing architecture models. The proposed framework can be used to build SOA solutions that support the key accountability requirements.