Standards and Initiatives for Service Modeling - The Case of OMG SoaML

Abstract

Service modeling is a key element of any service-oriented system. It is the foundation on which core service-related tasks such as service discovery, composition, and mediation rely. During the past years standardization bodies such as W3C, OMG and OASIS have been working on standardizing various aspects of services such as service functionalities, behavior, quality of services, etc. At the same time, initiatives from academia focused on developing ontologies and formal languages for specifying services. In this paper we give a brief overview of relevant initiatives and standardization activities in the area of service modeling, and, as an example of the use of such standards, guide the reader through the use of the OMG Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) in a concrete service-oriented scenario in the manufacturing domain.