Service Scope and Description
Decision Support Service
Version 0.0.1
10/27/2010

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Stakeholders
3 Business Area
4 Service Description
5 Service Scope
6 Service Interactions
7 Assumptions and Risks
8 Glossary

Introduction

The Decision support service provides a powerful discovery 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. This includes support for runtime contract discovery and negotiation; this supports the key requirement of the semantic infrastructure which is to support semantic workflow composition.
Runtime contract discovery and negotiation capabilities provided by the decision support service will allow the service orchestration tool to specify expressions that are processed by the decision support service to deliver service orchestration/compatibility recommendations.
The decision support service also provides a set of interfaces for generating reports based on specific user defined criteria to better identify services of specific profiles, etc. The governance service uses the decision support for generating compliance reporting based on specific input criteria.
The decision support service allows users to construct user friendly and ad-hoc queries, using natural language expressions, user-friendly semantic web queries, visual queries, etc. The results of these queries can be structured in multiple formats; this is the primary interface between the caGRID 2.0 service registry and the SI 2.0 infrastructure.
The Decision Support Service provides capabilities to:

• Construct and execute semantically rich queries.
• Develop custom analysis reports to support decision making
• Export information in multiple formats allowing the application of custom algorithms/rules to the metadata to additional analysis
• Ability to run reasoners (like OWL reasoners) and view results in a user friendly format
• Ability to perform impact analysis to identify dependencies and constraints
• Support both design-time and run-time contract discovery and negotiation

Stakeholders

Business Area

This service supports the semantic infrastructure, and will be used by all NCI project teams and external adopters to discover services and artifacts. The Decision Support Service will be the primary interface to the caGRID 2.0 infrastructure.

Service Description

The Decision Support Service will provide the following functionality:

• Provide a multiple mechanism to construct semantic queries
• Support natural language queries
• Specify format of reports generated as a result of the queries
• Search the registry for a model, existing value sets, OID's in an OID registry, etc.
• Retrieve an existing model from the Knowledge Management Service, schemas and form definitions.
• Download/Export information in user defined formats, applying the appropriate transforms
• Support for executing reasoners and display of information in a user friendly format
• Provide interfaces for service discovery and runtime contract negotiation.

• Identify dependencies

Service Scope

The scope of the Decision Support Service is limited to providing interfaces for querying and analysis of information.

Service Interactions

The Decisions Support Service will interact with the following systems and services:

1. Governance Service: The governance service uses this service to query for key metadata about the artifacts; this information is then used to define policies.
2. Knowledge Management Service: The decision support service provides a mechanism to construct semantic queries that can then be executed against the underlying artifacts; it also provides interfaces for generating reports, etc. The decision support service uses the knowledge management service to access the metadata

Assumptions and Risks

None

Glossary