Service discovery and governance allows service developers to specify rich metadata about services. This enables better discovery, and governance of services.
Capabilities supporting service discovery and governance may be summarized as:
- Formalization of Governance Policy Models, with definition and enforcement of rules and regulations, compliance monitoring, and adaptive policies across operational environments. Governance capabilities include predefined templates, workflows, and governance policies for governing the service lifecycle as well as an approval and review process for service specifications and the ability to promote services through the stages of the service lifecycle
- Service descriptions for using, re-using, deploying, managing, discovering, validating, testing, versioning, configuring, migrating, analyzing, binding, measuring, assembling, organizing, and controlling services.
- Policy models supporting creation, deletion, edit, maintenance, discovery of policy modules. Polcies help establish constraints on the service specifications.
- Complex search offering a natural and user-friendly way to find services by progressively refining search results using a variety of criteria including attributes, artifacts, classification, usage scenarios, and dependencies. This includes runtime contract discovery, a powerful query mechanism that allows either the service orchestrator or a program to find the services that best fit the requirements of a given process. This increases both runtime and design time flexibility by enabling selection of services based on computable metadata.
Functional Profile Group
- 5.1 - Administer Services Administer Services defines profiles for management of service metadata and service classification schemes.
- 5.1.1 - Service Classification Schemes A classification scheme for organizing services based on business objectives, domain, and usage
- 5.1.2 - Service Metadata A service description defines or references the information needed to use, deploy, manage and otherwise control a service. This includes not only the information and behavior models associated with a service to define the service interface but also includes information needed to decide whether the service is appropriate for the current needs of the service consumer. Thus, the service description will also include information such as service reachability, service functionality, and the policies and contracts associated with a service.
- 5.1.3 - Transaction Management An important class of joint service action is the business transaction, or contract exchange. Many interactions between participants in the SOA ecosystem are based around business transactions. A business transaction is a joint action engaged in by two or more participants in which the ownership of one of more resources is exchanged.
- 5.2 - Analyze Services Analyze Services defines profiles for service analysis, providing support for determining characteristics including service interaction dependencies, service reuse, service conformance assessment, heterogeneous data interchange, and service collaboration compatibility.
- 5.2.1 - Analyze Information and behavioral models, in conjunction with discovery mechanisms, mediation, classification, traceability from requirement to operation, and interaction logs, enable comprehensive analysis to be performed through-out the life-cycle of artifacts , from design through run-time implementation.
- 5.2.2 - Reason The semantic models managed by the Semantic Infrastructure enable enhanced reasoning.
- 5.3 - Search and Access Services Search and Access Services defines profiles supporting the discovery and visualization of services.
- 5.3.1 - Discover A key function desired by virtually all stakeholders is the ability to query by example using an item from a model or vocabulary (e.g., data element, property, data type, constraint, relation, concept, etc.) to find equivalent and related elements defined anywhere in the knowledge repository. The response should provide an easily understood description of the degree and nature of the semantic convergence between the example item and responsive items.
- 5.3.2 - Find
- 5.3.3 - Runtime Contract Discovery A powerful query mechanism that allows either the service orchestrator or a program to find the services that best fit the requirements of a given process. This increases both runtime and design time flexibility by enabling selection of services based on computable metadata.
- 5.3.4 - Service Generation The execution context of a service interaction is the set of infrastructure elements, process entities, policy assertions and agreements that are identified as part of an instantiated service interaction, and thus forms a path between those with needs and those with capabilities. Service generation is the ability to provision an execution context from the service descriptions, and associated artifacts, managed by the Semantic Infrastructure.
- 5.3.5 - Visualize Given the complexity of the models in use, and the large number, users are constantly confronted with the problem of trying to gain an understanding of new domains not familiar to them. Visualizations of models and vocabularies are perceived as essential to this task. The requirement is to provide visualizations that are easy to navigate, that identify the contact points between models and between vocabularies and that allow users to seamlessly move from model constructs to data.
- 5.4 - Service Governance and workflows This includes predefined templates, workflows, and governance policies for governing the service lifecycle as well as an approval and review process for service specifications and the ability to promote services through the stages of the service lifecycle.
- 5.4.1 - Governance Processes The BIG Health vision brings a lot more stakeholders into the KR. Each of these has their own governance processes in respect to metadata and terminology. At a minimum the KR has to be aware of these processes, and their outcomes, to be able to express the status of metadata definitions and terminology concepts it contains. Some stakeholders expressed the wish to manage their governance processes within the KR.
- 5.4.2 - Services Users expressed requirements that suggest caBIG® services are not sufficiently described to determine if they meets a user’s requirements or are interoperable with other services. These requirements are deemed applicable to future KR services.
- 5.5 - Service Policies Service policies help establish constraints on the service specifications and mandate an approach. Policies can be specified around governance, access control and other design and runtime constraints.
- 5.5.1 - Access Control Policies Service policies help establish constraints on the service specifications and mandate an approach. Policies can be specified around access control constraints.
- 5.5.2 - Design Constraint Policies Service policies help establish constraints on the service specifications and mandate an approach. Policies can be specified around design constraints.
- 5.5.3 - Governance Policies Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. Consequently, it is important that organizations that plan to engage in service interactions adopt governance policies and procedures sufficient to ensure that there is standardization across both internal and external organizational boundaries to promote the effective creation and use of SOA-based services.
- 5.5.4 - Runtime Constraint Policies Service policies help establish constraints on the service specifications and mandate an approach. Policies can be specified around runtime constraints.
