A holistic view of industry standards across SOA solution stack

Businesses recently began shifting from proprietary models towards industry standards. Today, when businesses are faced with medium and large SOA projects, they strive to standardize their business process models, information models, and message models by complying with known industry standards. As service orientation and composition become more important, these standards also become critical for efficient SOA integration. However, in doing so, the businesses face a new challenge - the challenge to effectively utilize the industry standards models. Using industry standards models effectively is difficult since they are typically large and complex, thus resulting in the creation of vast amounts of inter-relationships. To meet this challenge, we describe a new approach that provides a holistic view of these heterogeneous SOA models and corresponding industry standards. Such a unified view must provide access to heterogeneous data sources and models, allow search and query of them as a single model source all across the SOA solution stack, and provide advanced services such as traceability, scoping, and impact analysis. To validate the proposed holistic approach, we describe a model catalog and repository system and present its use on a field-based example. © 2009 IEEE.