Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming the mainstream for providing efficient and agile business solutions that can keep up with changes demanded by the business world. The task of identifying candidate services is one of the main activities in developing software service-oriented models. The current service identification approaches exhibit some limitations, where they are either too complex to be adopted, too simple to satisfy all SOA principles, or are theoretical approaches that are far from automation. On the other side, ontologies have been introduced in a number of phases in the SOA development lifecycle, mainly in the design and implementation phases. This research is concerned with introducing an ontology-based framework to semantically generate services from business process architectures (BPA) and using a simple service identification approach that is based on the BP A for an organisation. In this research, a novel architectural framework has been introduced that is generic, extensible, BPA-driven, ontology-based and domain independent, but uses a simple and automatic service identification approach that adheres to SOA principles. We named this framework BPAOntoSOA, and its activities are structured into two main layers. The first layer is concerned with generating a business process architecture ontology, namely the BPAOnt ontology, for a particular organisation given the Riva-based business process architecture of that organisation and the set of associated business process models. The second layer is concerned with identifying the software services using the generated BP AOnt ontology for that organisation. In order to realise this framework, we developed the abstract BP AOnt ontology to provide a conceptual representation of Riva BP A elements and the associated BPM elements. We have also proposed a novel service identification approach based on the Riva BPA and utilised its simplicity (as being systematic in identifying and modelling a BPA) to identify services in a simple and straightforward manner while satisfying SOA principles. The BP AOntoSOA framework, the BP AOnt ontology and the proposed service identification approach have been evaluated using the Jordan's Cancer Care and Registration (CCR) processes case study in an attempt to assess the correctness of the service identification approach as well as the framework behaviour in general. This has revealed that: (1) the BP AOnt ontology contributes remarkably not only as a major component in the BP AOntoSOA framework, but also as a source of business knowledge describing the process architecture and associated business process models of an organisation to be extracted and reused, (2) the service identification approach is simple, automatic and conforms to SOAprinciples, (3) the introduction of the concept of RP A clusters to the Riva method in order group related architectural elements forming the basis for identifying services and, (4) a further suggested modification to the Riva method in order to provide better conformance to SOA principles and hence better alignment between BP As and the service oriented model of computing. In Conclusion, this research has contributed to align business process architecture and the service oriented model of computing through the newly introduced BPAOntoSOA framework. xix
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:524727 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Yousef, Rana Mohammad |
| Publisher | University of the West of England, Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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