Technology-Independent Modeling of Service Interaction

Systems based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be implemented with many different technologies, and in particular, they can be implemented with a heterogeneous set of technologies. An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a typical option for bridging the technology boundaries. It is desirable to have technology-independent models of the core services in the IT system. We present here computation-independent models (CIMs) and platform-independent models (PIMs) for service oriented architectures. Our models have the following advantages: Some of the CIMs are closely related to Petri net approaches; the PIMs are expressed in the same formalism as the CIMs; a canonical PIM is easily derived from a CIM; the semantics of the PIMs matches the operation of a typical enterprise service bus architecture. Finally, both CIM and PIM are defined as core semantic data models and can therefore be created with most semantic data modeling tools.