Summary
Description of the profile
Service discovery allows primary users as well as secondary users to locate a service specification and instances based on attributes in the service metadata (for example, via a search for specific micro-array analysis services)
Discovery has architectural implications on the Semantic Infrastructure:
Service Descriptions include reference to policies defining conditions of use and optionally contracts representing agreement on policies and other conditions. This requires the following capabilities (as also enumerated under governance):
- descriptions to enable the service modules to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier for the service and a sufficient, and preferably a machine processible, representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the service, its functions, and its effects;
- one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for services that best meet the search criteria specified by the service participant; where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual service descriptions, possibly through some repository mechanism;
- accessible storage of services and service descriptions, so service participants can access, examine, and use the services as defined.
Descriptions include references to metrics which describe the operational characteristics of the subjects being described. This requires the following capabilities (as partially enumerated under governance):
- the infrastructure monitoring and reporting information on SOA resources;
- possible interface requirements to make accessible metrics information generated or most easily accessed by the service itself;
- mechanisms to catalog and enable discovery of which metrics are available for a described resources and information on how these metrics can be accessed;
- mechanisms to catalog and enable discovery of compliance records associated with policies and contracts that are based on these metrics.
Descriptions provide up-to-date information on what a resource is, the conditions for interacting with the resource, and the results of such interactions. As such, the description is the source of vital information in establishing willingness to interact with a resource, reachability to make interaction possible, and compliance with relevant conditions of use. This requires the existence of:
- one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for described resources that best meet the criteria specified by a service participant, where the discovery mechanism will have access to individual descriptions, possibly through some repository mechanism;
- tools to appropriately track users of the descriptions and notify them when a new version of the description is available.
Capabilities
Requirements traceability
Requirement |
Source |
Capability |
|---|---|---|
The use of well defined service metadata promotes better discovery and reuse of services during design and run time. Service metadata includes information about service interactions and dependencies. It also includes a classification scheme for organizing services based on business objectives, domain, and usage. It also links services to all the supporting artifacts in the specification and provides a placeholder for conformance statements. This enables better reuse across the enterprise and eliminates redundancy. |
Semantic Infrastructure Requirements::Service Discovery and Governance::Administer Services |
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This group of requirements focuses on enabling developers of composite services and applications to discover, compose, and invoke services. This includes the discovery of published services based on service metadata and the generation of client APIs in multiple languages to provide cross-platform access to existing services. The platform will use the semantic infrastructure service metadata to address all the service discovery requirements. The semantic infrastructure relies on metadata about services and artifacts. Link to use case satisfied from caGRID 2.0 Roadmap: As institutions share de-identified glioblastoma data sets, they are available to others via data discovery. The treatment recommendation service used by the oncologist is able to discover these new data sets and their corresponding information models, and include that data for subsequent use in recommendation of treatment. Link to use case satisfied from caGRID 2.0 Roadmap: all of the data management and access services in the use case are utilized by application developers to build the user interfaces that the clinicians use during the course of patient care. |
Semantic Infrastructure Requirements::caGRID 2.0 Platform and Terminology Integration::Service Discovery and Utilization |
serviceDiscovery
Description
Service Discovery
The use of well defined service metadata promotes better discovery and reuse of services during design and run time. Service metadata includes information about service interactions and dependencies. It also includes a classification scheme for organizing services based on business objectives, domain, and usage. It also links services to all the supporting artifacts in the specification and provides a placeholder for conformance statements. This enables better reuse across the enterprise and eliminates redundancy.
Service Discovery provides the following capabilities
- one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for services that best meet the search criteria specified by the service participant; where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual service descriptions through some repository mechanism;
- accessible storage of service descriptions, so service participants can access, examine, and use the services as defined.
- access to metrics information about services obtained from the platform infrastructure monitoring and notification capabilities
- mechanisms to catalog and enable discovery of which metrics are available for a described service and information on how these metrics can be accessed;
- mechanisms to catalog and enable discovery of compliance records associated with services that are based on these metrics.
- one or more mechanisms to capture, describe, store, discover, and retrieve interaction logs, execution contexts, and the combined interaction descriptions;
- one or more mechanisms for attaching to any results the means to identify and retrieve the interaction description under which the results were generated.
- tools to facilitate identifying description elements that are to be aggregated to assemble the composite description;
- tools to facilitate identifying the sources of information to associate with the description elements;
- tools to collect the identified description elements and their associated sources into a standard, referenceable format that can support general access and understanding;
- tools to automatically update the composite service as the component sources change, and to consistently apply versioning schemes to identify the new description contents and the type and significance of change that occurred.
- tools to appropriately track users of the descriptions and notify them when a new version of the description is available.
Requirements addressed
