Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is currently a popular subject with no consensus or standardized reference model to define it. While many believe that Web Services1 or ebXML2 are SOA, they are in fact, specialized implementations of SOA.

If SOA is truly an architecture, it must be definable as one. The authors of this paper have started standards work to define an SOA reference model as part of an OASIS3 project.

This paper examines SOA, its history, business drivers and the standards that may beused to implement it. It attempts to define SOA and reviews basic and extended models of SOA in use today. For the purposes of this paper, SOA is defined by abstracting the common concepts and elements from architectures and standards that claim to be service oriented. The localized definition of SOA is therefore subject to change in the future.