Vocabulary and Ontology Standards for SOA and Domain Services Working session/Panel Discussion December 11, 2007 OMG SOA SIG meeting

2 2 Need for SOA Ontology, potential benefits, Categories of Services Case for Business Services in Insurance Case for Healthcare Candidate OMG standards Next Steps  Develop a RFP to define SOA Ontology?  Develop a RFP to define Ontology of Insurance Services? Agenda

3 Need for SOA Ontology Reality Check: ‘Not All Services are Created Equal’ Very soon an organization will end up with a ‘large’ number of Services (mostly bunch of ‘Web Services’) and the ‘Versions’ of each Service Such a ‘Pile of Services’ neither serves Business nor IT very well  Can not effectively explain level of reusability, functionality, cost to business looking to fulfill new requirements  Cannot effectively assess level of composition achievable Success/maturity/automation of SOA efforts will benefit from SOA Ontology There does not seem to be an industry standard Ontology of Services

4 Potential Benefits SOA Ontology could:  Facilitate common understanding of Services (coupled with a vocabulary of Terms described in a Natural Language) available across ‘Consumers’ and ‘Providers’ of Services Help explain to business stakeholders what Services are available to support given Business Processes  Enable discovery and execution of Services by ‘Software Agents’ resulting in further automation of SOA based platforms (machine interpretation is a key feature) For automation (Straight Through Processing -STP) and scalability of SOA Event, Process and ‘domain Information’ Ontologies are equally important  Domain Information such as Healthcare, Insurance, financial Services…

5 Where is Ontology needed for SOA? Architecture view Service Description Model Service Visibility Model Interacting with Services Model Policies and Contracts Model Governance Model … Business view Stakeholders and Participants Model Needs and Capabilities Model Resources Model Social Structure Model …

6 Insurance Use Case – Cindy Maike, Don Allen (OMG Insurance WG members) Healthcare Use case – Ken Rubin

7 Candidate OMG Standards SBVR To define Services in Natural Language by Business stakeholders/SMEs, Analysts  Not modeling savvy audience Web based tools (supporting SBVR) to enable define/search of available Services Document Rules for Services in a natural language but formal enough to forward- engineer simple Services Export as XMI? to SOA repositories, modeling tools ODM Develop Ontologies of Services, associated Processes, Service Payload…  Targeted to modeling savvy audience Modeling tools such as UML tools with ODM add-on or Ontology modeling tools Forward engineer output as RDF, OWL, ??? Used by ‘Reasoning Engines’, Software Agents… UPMS To model Service metadata

8 Next steps Establish a team of SOA SIG, Ontology PSIG, Insurance WG, Healthcare DTF members and ??? to develop:  RFP for SOA Ontology Who wants to get involved  RFP for Insurance Business Services Services to support Claim Management Who wants to get involved  Deeper dive into what Healthcare DTF (HSSP Project) is doing and leverage their work/lessons learnt

9 9 Contact Info: Thanks for your Time..