Skip to main content

Peter F Brown

Transforming Our Relationships With Information Technologies
Home
About Us
Projects
Pattern Languages
Transforming Government
US - Trusted Identities
SOA
Cloud
Privacy
Analogue-Digital Gap
Colophon
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 
SOA, despite what you might be led to believe, is not a technology - it is a standard, a paradigm for organizing and using distributed capabilities that are governed and run under different ownership domains.
 

It is relevant in areas as diverse as identity management, cloud computing and emerging Smart Grid infrastructures.

The Reference Model for SOA
If much of the Reference Model seems like common sense today, it is probably because a small group of people took the unorthodox step late in 2004 to push back against the then industry trend, which was simply to see "SOA" as a sort of branding exercise for emerging Web Service technologies.
 
I worked from the outset as part of that core group and was one of the five editors who brought the earlydrafts through the OASIS technical process to be finally adopted as an OASIS Standard in October 2006.
 
 
The Reference Model is cited and used in a wide range of areas, from health systems to the defence industry and is seeing more recent validation in work on Smart Grid, on Privacy Management and even Electronic Court Filing systems.
The OASIS SOA Reference Architecture Framework (SOA-RAF)
Whereas the Reference Model dealt with the most fundamental concepts of the SOA paradigm, the Reference Architecture Framework looks in detail at the environment in which a SOA-based system might be deployed.
While remaining deliberately abstract and technology-agnostic, the Framework is the first serious attempt to distinguish such concepts as Ecosystem, System, Stakeholder, Participant, Actor, and Service, which are bandied around with imprecision and inevitably lead to communications breakdown in discussions between different parties.
 
The Framework is currently (Sep to Oct 2011) in a public review phase and can be reviewed here.