Using UML 2.0 collaborations for compositional service specification

Collaborations and collaboration uses are features new to UML 2.0. They possess many properties that support rapid and compositional service engineering. The notion of collaboration corresponds well with the notion of a service, and it seems promising to use them for service specification. We present an approach where collaborations are used to specify services, and show how collaborations enable high level feature composition by means of collaboration uses. We also show how service goals can be combined with behavior descriptions of collaborations to form what we call semantic interfaces. Semantic interfaces can be used to ensure compatibility when binding roles to classes and when composing systems from components. Various ways to compose collaboration behaviors are outlined and illustrated with telephony services.