Model-Driven Development of a Mediation Service

Abstract

Although service-oriented architectures offer real benefits when pursuing application integration and business flexibility, there are still no satisfactory solutions for dealing with existing systems that need to cooperate while their services have no perfect match. In the case of incompatible services, a 'mediator' may be introduced which resolves (semantic) interoperability problems by intervening in the cooperation between systems. Building mediators is currently often a manual process, resulting in dedicated IT-driven solutions, with no concern for reuse of process, models or code. This paper presents a framework to guide the development of mediators, with the following objectives: (i) uncover and capture the actual interoperability problem that needs to be solved; (ii) allow the involvement of non-IT (i.e., business) experts in the development of the solution; (iii) support evolution of the solution and re-use of results in case of changing interoperability requirements; (iv) facilitate automation of parts of the process. The framework is based on service-oriented, model-driven and semantic web techniques. Available tool support for the different steps in the framework is indicated.

Towards a Flexible Service Integration through Separation of Business Rules

“…We define service mediation as "to act as an intermediary agent in reconciling differences between services of two or more systems" [21]. It involves reconciling two types of differences or mismatches: process and data.…”

“…This paper focuses on the separation of business rules from the business process. As part of the integration framework for service integration [21], our approach comprises an integration methodology shown in Figure 6.…”

Model-driven development of mediation for business services using COSMO

“…The benefits of these types of semantical enrichment can however only be fully exploited when using a language that allows one to explicitly model and reason about the semantics classes and their properties. [26] discusses the use of OWL for this purpose, and explores its potential for automated reasoning and composition. In this paper, we focus on the model-driven aspect of our integration method, and will discuss its combination with semantic-web technology in a forthcoming paper.…”

“…For the same reason as explained at the end of the previous section, this information model is not enriched to define the relationships between the classes and properties from the information models of Blue and Moon, except for informal annotations that may explain these relationships using natural language. [26] discusses a formal approach in defining such relationships using OWL. The information model is extended, however, with classes to represent status information of the Mediator, such as the set of order line items that have been confirmed so far.…”

An Experience in Applying Model-Driven Engineering for an Enterprise Management System

“…The usage of MDE techniques allows the automation of specific operations and brings "information hiding" principles to the development process, fostering specialization. Work towards solving specific enterprise domain problems using MDE has been performed recently and has shown positive results (Quartel, 2008) (White, 2007).…”