Ontological Support for the Evolution of Future Services Oriented Architectures

Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a useful framework for developing interoperable, large-scale systems, typically implemented using the Web Services (WS) standards. However, the maintenance and evolution of SOA systems present many challenges. SmartLife applications are intelligent user-centered systems and a special class of SOA systems that present even greater challenges for a software maintainer. Ontologies and ontological modeling can be used to support the evolution of SOA systems. This paper describes the development of a SOA evolution ontology and its use to develop an ontological model of a SOA system. The ontology is based on a standard SOA ontology. The ontological model can be used to provide semantic and visual support for software maintainers during routine maintenance tasks. We discuss a case study to illustrate this approach, as well as the strengths and limitations.