Data and Semantic Technology Architectures for SOA

Objective of Meeting

This was a joint meeting of the SOA and Semantic Interoperability Working Groups.

The previous, highly-successful joint meeting in Glasgow on Information Architecture for SOA established the need to address information in the Business Architecture phase of TOGAF, and suggested how this should be done. This meeting aimed to build on those conclusions to consider the impact on TOGAF's Information Systems Architectures and Technology Architecture phases.

Summary

Chris Harding, The Open Group Forum Director for Semantic Interoperability and SOA, opened the meeting and gave a brief presentation to start the discussion.

Nikhil Kumar, President & CEO of Applied Technology Solutions Inc., and co-chair of the SOA Reference Architecture project, then used slides from the ApTSi conference presentation on Information Architecture and the Actionable Enterprise Architecture to describe a reference model for information architecture.

This led to an excellent discussion, centered on the concept of an information service performed by virtualization of information from multiple sources (see slide 21 of the presentation). This concept may appear in different forms (see, for example, the presentation on Data Services for SOA, WOA, and Cloud Computing given by Eric Samson in the Enterprise and Information Governance in an SOA Environment stream on Monday), but is a common feature of data architectures in SOA.

Outputs

This record, and the more detailed minutes available to Working Group members, form the principal outputs of the meeting.

Next Steps

It was agreed that the following topics require further work:

• Information discovery, as an alternative to, or replacement for, service discovery
• Models for metadata interoperability
• Models for presentation of and control of access to combinations of data elements

Links

See above.