At the March SOA Consortium meeting, Cory Casanave, CEO, Model Driven Solutions & ModelDriven.org, gave an overview presentation & demo on Enterprise SOA Modeling with the new OMG SoaML UML profile. (pdf)
SoaML is a UML profile and metamodel for the design of services within a service-oriented architecture. SoaML can be used for architecture level modeling, or as part of a model driven architecture (MDA) process, starting with a business model and transitioning through logical and physical models, resulting in technology implementation. Since it is a UML profile, it is immediately compatible with existing UML tools.
Casanave began by setting context, describing the rationale and objectives of SoaML, how SoaML views a service (agreement between parties to exchange something), the top-down (business-driven) and bottoms-up (legacy-aware) usage paths, and the mapping of those paths to model driven architecture (MDA).
To bring the specification to life, Casanave walked through the artifacts related to a claims processing scenario, including the services architecture model (see below), business process model, service contract, participant interaction model, message types, service interface, service usage, participant model, composite application structure and information model.
[Click on Picture to Enlarge]
Included in the example was the iteration of model detail as the process moved from business concept to logical model to systems model. In a follow-on demonstration, Casanave highlighted the transition from physical model to technology implementation using ModelPro, a new open source tool.
Even if you don’t have the time to listen to the podcast of Cory’s talk, I highly recommend flipping through the slide deck to see SoaML in the context of a real business example. All of the artifact slides are nicely annotated like the one above.
To listen to the audio recording of the presentation portion of Casanave’s session and/or view the rest of the slides go here. To view the entire SoaML specification, please go here. (200 page pdf)
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links.]
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