Runtime Contract Discovery Functional Profile
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.
Contract Discovery has architectural implications on the Semantic Infrastructure:
Service descriptions include reference to contracts representing agreement on policies and other conditions. This requires the following capabilities:
- descriptions to enable the contracts to be visible, where the description includes a unique identifier for the contract and a sufficient, and preferably a machine processible, representation of the meaning of terms used to describe the contract, its functions, and its effects;
- one or more discovery mechanisms that enable searching for contracts that best meet the search criteria specified by the service participant; where the discovery mechanism will have access to the individual contract descriptions, possibly through some repository mechanism;
- accessible storage of contract, so service participants can access, examine, and use the contracts as defined.
Contracts include references to metrics which describe the operational characteristics of the subjects being described. This requires the following capabilities:
- 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 contracts that are based on these metrics.
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 requires the following capabilities:
- 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.
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 requires the existence of:
- 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 description 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.
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.
This Functional Profile includes, but is not limited to, the following capability elaborations:
Derived From Requirements
- Gap Analysis::Discover::013 - Identify semantically similar data elements Identify semantically similar data elements
- Gap Analysis::Discover::048 - Improve searching for best CDE version Improve searching for “best” CDE version
- Gap Analysis::HL7 CIC::CIC-10 - Compare data elements for semantic similarities There is a need for users to upload/download sets and concurrently compare to existing registry elements for semantic similarities
queryBestCdeVersion
Improve searching for “best” CDE version
semanticAlignment
Identify semantically similar data elements
