Towards services paradigm: principles and models

Service-oriented engineering is a new paradigm that makes use of services as basic constructs to support the development of distributed applications. The paper presents a metamodel for services. This metamodel is based on 5 principles: goal-orientation, variability, use of semantic, dynamic personalization and dynamic composition. A profiling mechanism is used to specify 3 models of services: one for business services, one for information systems engineering services and one for pedagogic services. The presentation of the metamodel is coupled with 2 metaprocesses: one for providing (i.e. designing and publishing) services and one for consuming (i.e. discovering and invoking) services. The objective of these proposals is to increase relevancy of services and reduce the gap between the description of services and requirements of their consumers.