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.
The Service Governance and workflows category contains functional profiles derived from the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance Model and the SOA Service Description Model. 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.
A service description is an artifact, usually document-based, that 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.
SOA governance requires numerous architectural capabilities in the Semantic Infrastructure:
Governance is expressed through policies and assumes multiple use of focused policy modules that can be employed across many common circumstances. This is elaborated in the inherited Policy profile.
Governance requires that the participants understand the intent of governance, the structures created to define and implement governance, and the processes to be followed to make governance operational. This is provided by capabilities specialized from the inherited Management Profile.
Governance policies are made operational through rules and regulations. This is provided by the following capabilities, most of which are specializations of the inherited Artifact Profile:
- descriptions to enable the rules and regulations to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier and a sufficient, and preferably a machine process-able, representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the rules and regulations;
- one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for rules and regulations that may apply to situations corresponding to the search criteria specified by the service participant, where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual descriptions of rules and regulations, possibly through some repository mechanism;
- accessible storage of rules and regulations and their respective descriptions, so service participants can understand and prepare for compliance, as defined.
- SOA services to access automated implementations of the Governance Processes.
Governance implies management to define and enforce rules and regulations. This is elaborated in the inherited Management profile.
Governance relies on metrics to define and measure compliance. This is elaborated in the inherited Metric profile.
Architectural implications of service description for the Semantic Infrastructure are reflected in the following functional decomposition:
- Description will change over time and its contents will reflect changing needs and context. This is elaborated in the inherited Change profile.
- Description makes use of defined semantics, where the semantics may be used for categorization or providing other property and value information for description classes. This is elaborated in the inherited Semantic Model profile.
- Descriptions include reference to policies defining conditions of use and optionally contracts representing agreement on policies and other conditions. This is elaborated in the inherited Policy profile.
- Descriptions include references to metrics which describe the operational characteristics of the subjects being described. This is elaborated in the inherited Metrics profile.
- Descriptions of the interactions are important for enabling auditability and repeatability, thereby establishing a context for results and support for understanding observed change in performance or results. This is elaborated in the inherited Interaction profile.
- Descriptions may capture very focused information subsets or can be an aggregate of numerous component descriptions. Service description is an example of a likely aggregate for which manual maintenance of all aspects would not be feasible. This is elaborated in the inherited Composition profile.
- 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 is elaborated in the inherited Interoperability profile.
Functional Profile
- 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.
