SOA: Ontology and Taxonomy of Services

As someone misinterpreted the use of the term "service" as an idiom in my last post, to imply that the post was about defining that "a specific service is a single business process step" (rather than being about semantic covenant services); let me point to two 'Architecture Journal' articles defining important terms for discussing service-orientation:

• Ontology and Taxonomy of Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture
• Service-Oriented Modeling for Connected Systems

The articles are about the defining different categories of services and about creating business models and mapping business capabilities to services. The last article covers Motion (video at Channel9), which is now known as Microsoft Services Business Architecture (MSBA).

Think of this when reading the articles:

A service classification scheme should have the "hierarchy" taxomomy form. It should not use a scientific hierarchy nor a tree form. There must be no "is using" or "is dependent on" relation between the services in the taxonomy. There can be no dependency between services in SOA except for composite services realizing a business process by consuming the actual services. Taking a dependency on another service will break the central "services are autonomous" tenet of SOA. Having a service calling another service will just repeat the failure of DCOM/CORBA for distributed system design, using RPC over web-services solves nothing.