Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm for defining how people, organizations and systems provide and use services to achieve results.

A service is an offer of value to another through a well-defined interface and available to a community (which could be the general public). A service results in work provided to one by another.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a way of organizing and understanding (representations of) organizations, communities and systems to maximize agility, scale and interoperability. The SOA approach is simple - people, organizations and systems provide services to each other. These services allow us to get something done without doing it ourselves or even without knowing how to do it - enabling us to be more efficient and agile. Services also enable us to offer our capabilities to others in exchange for some value - thus establishing a community, process or marketplace. The SOA paradigm works equally well for integrating existing capabilities as for creating and integrating new capabilities.

(Derived from Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) - Specification for the UML Profile and Metamodel for Services (UPMS) (OMG document ad/2008-11-01); pp. 25-26.)

In modeling and developing a complete Service Oriented Architecture in Enterprise Architect, you can work with any or all of:

XML Schema Definition (XSD), also known as XML Schema - an XML technology that is used to specify the rules to which an XML document must adhere; Enterprise Architect provides a Schema Composer interface to help you model and generate XML schema
XSL Transformations to convert input documents into XML or other types of document using XSL stylesheets, for which you use the XSLT Editor and Debugger for modeling and executing the transformations
Web Services Description Language 1.1 (WSDL) - a key XML-based language for describing web services
Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) - a standard method of designing and modeling SOA solutions using the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF) - a service-oriented development life cycle methodology, offering a number of modeling practices and disciplines that contribute to successful service-oriented life cycle management and modeling
National Information Exchange Modeling (NIEM) - a common framework that is used to define how information can be shared between systems, government agencies and departments
Meta-Object Facility (MOF) - an Object Management Group (OMG) standard developed as a meta-modeling architecture to define the UML, and so provide a means to define the structure or abstract syntax of a language or of data

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