OMG SOA WG Announcement



OMG Working Group on SOA is convened Tuesday, December 6, 2005, 09:00-12:00 at OMG TC Meeting, Burlingame, CA There is a huge amount of activity in the area of Service Oriented Architecture - judging from vendors, analysts, conferences, the media, and other standards organizations such as OASIS. Although there is a gap between the promise of the evangelists, which talks in terms of business-driven agility and enterprise architecture and most of the activity which is focused on technical interoperability based on web services. Yet there seems to have been no externally-visible OMG activity in the 'SOA' space (which is not to deny that existing OMG standards are applicable). SOA is ripe for use of MDA, in that SOA has: - a lot of ad-hoc approaches, experience and products that make this a practical not a research area - very rapidly changing platform (both in standards and products); - an intent (not well realized) of developing business-oriented services that are hence more reusable and longer-lived; - the promise of a higher level of abstraction in application development - the need to integrate services into Event Driven Architectures (EDA)- see http://www.infoconomy.com/pages/bpm-resources/group96435.adp - (presumably) the need to manage the Architecture of such systems and enterprises Potentially this spans many different areas of OMG, for example: - MARS with respect to the platform services, including registries - ADTF with respect to modeling techniques for services, architectures and related abstractions - BMI (formerly BEI) with respect to service orchestration, but just as importantly with providing the traceability to the business - Ontology SIG with respect to applying semantic richness to web service definition - Agents SIG with respect to EDA and sense-and-respond - Domain Task Forces with respect to standardizing specific Services Hence we have convened this SOA Working Group to bring together interested parties and initiate appropriate OMG activity in this area. It's worth pointing out that this has been initiated by an end user (MetLife). The following is a list of potential topics for the kick-off meeting; a detailed agenda will be put together based on feedback (and volunteers!) 1. What exactly is the scope of SOA? (There are some reference models that could be considered) 2. What is the SOA 'Platform' and what are the important standards? 3. What are people doing today with respect to SOA - in particular with respect to any modeling activity? And in what areas would they like to see more support/standards? 4. What relevant standards and activities currently exist within OMG? 5. What are the gaps that it makes sense for OMG to fill?? 6. What longer term activity, if any, should be spawned (e.g. a SIG, RFI, straight to RFPs)? We have established a mailing list: soa@omg.org. Subscribe by sending an email to request@omg.org. Please share your thoughts on the need for this activity, proposed approaches and agenda items. Also whether you'd be interested in making a short presentation at the meeting: we are particularly keen to hear from people to speak to item 3 above - we'd like a range of users, vendors, consultants. Regards, Pete Rivett, Jim Odell, Harsh Sharma (MetLife)