SOA Working Group Open Meeting
Working Group co-chair Tony Carrato of IBM opened the meeting and welcomed the participants,
who briefly introduced themselves and described their reasons for participating.
He gave a presentation
describing the working group, and a leader or active participant in each of the projects
gave an update on its state: Mats Gejnevall of Capgemini for SOA Governance, Awel Dico of the
Bank of Montreal for the SOA/TOGAF Practical guide, Jorge Diaz of IBM for the Reference Architecture,
Hemesh Yadev of Unisys for Service-Oriented Infrastructure,
and Chris Harding of The Open Group for the SOA Ontology and SOA Security projects.
The ensuing discussion covered:
- The time commitment for participation in the Working Group
(up to three hours per week, but ideally related to the participants' normal work activities
so that it is not that much extra time)
- How to get an overview of everything going on in the Working Group
(through the regular Working Group teleconferences of which there is one every two
weeks)
- The balance between vendor and customer members (about twice as many vendors as customers in numerical terms,
but the vendors are more active)
- Whether the Working Group has a roadmap (there is no
overall roadmap, but each project has its individual schedule,
and the projects coordinate through the Working Group teleconferences)
- When new deliverables will appear (the Ontology project is closest
to producing a published document; the Governance project expects
to publish interim output later in the year; the Reference Architecture,
Service-Oriented Infrastructure, and SOA Security projects are still at early
stages)
- Liaison with other consortia (there are good practical connections with the OMG
and there is coordination with them and, to a lesser extent, with OASIS and the SOA Consortium
through an SOA harmonization activity; OASIS has appointed formal liaisons to the Working Group;
the Ontology project has exposed its work to OMG, OASIS, the US Federal CIO Council
Semantic Interoperability and SOA communities of practice, and W3C; the Governance project
has leveraged the connection between the Architecture Forum and CoBIT,
and intends to connect with ITIL; there are liaison discussions in progress with the TMF;
there are informal connections with the NCOIC;
and the Working Group is in principle open to collaboration with other standards bodies and
consortia)
- How IPR issues are addressed (through The Open Group membership agreement)
- Whether the Working Group is addressing quality dimensions other than Security
(yes, at the Service-Oriented Infrastructure level)
SOA/TOGAF Practical Guide
The discussions on this topic were led by project co-chair Awel Dico.
These initially covered the scope, which was clarified as covering practical guidance
to an Enterprise Architect who is trained in TOGAF and wishes to use TOGAF to develop
a Service-Oriented Architecture.
The meeting then discussed the guidance needed
for the Preliminary and Vision phases of the TOGAF Architecture Development Method, and
members of the Semantic Interoperability Working Group joined the meeting
for discussion of the Data Architecture sub-phase. There was clear agreement
on the importance of an Information Architecture Reference Model. The Semantic Interoperability
Working Group is working on this, and will share its results with the SOA Working Group.
The document structure of the Practical Guide was agreed,
and volunteers to work on particular topics were identified.
SOA Reference Architecture
Reference Architecture project co-chair Nikhil Kumar led this discussion.
The scope and role of the Reference Architecture, and the current state of the project, were reviewed.
The project has developed a set of principles by which the Reference Architecture will be developed,
and is proceeding with that development using a base document submitted by IBM and comparing this
with other input reference architectures.
The base document includes a metamodel. This was reviewed briefly, and will be discussed
over the immediate future as an important foundation for subsequent work.
The base document defines a number of layers and cross-cutting concerns.
There is broad agreement on these, but substantial work is needed
on the detail. After discussion on the level of detail that is needed,
and how it should be described and expressed, a project plan
for completion of the Reference Architecture was drawn up.
SOA and Security
This was a joint session with the Security Forum, and was led by SOA and Security
project co-chair Fred Etemadieh.
The session was largely devoted to two
presentations on use cases and business scenarios -
Paul Ashley of IBM Australia presented a Government Example, and
Ron Williams of IBM Austin described
models for web-services security.
There was lively discussion during the course of these presentations,
but the meeting did not attempt to produce formal conclusions.
