The evolution of service-oriented architectures toward market places for business services in the Internet, raises the need for rich service descriptions with respect to service proposition and service discovery. Service providers face the challenge of business-oriented development of service descriptions for there is no conceptual formalism, a wide range and overlapping IT standards, and low alignment between business and IT. This paper reports from a research project which develops a service description method that allows documenting, communicating, and reasoning about service descriptions on various levels depending on intention and abstraction. It introduces the concepts of service market places, offers a business service meta model, and shows a valid UML Profile for it. Furthermore, a case study in the IT outsourcing domain demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. |
(from crpit.com)
