Formalizing and Validating UML Architecture Description of Service-Oriented Applications

Abstract

Service-oriented applications, especially web systems, are self-descriptive software components which can automatically be discovered and engaged, together with other web components, to complete tasks over the Internet. The importance of service-oriented application architecture descriptions has been widely recognized in recently year. One of the main perceived benefits of a service-oriented application architecture description is that such a description facilitates system property analysis and thus can detect and prevent web design errors in an earlier stage, which are critical for service-oriented applications. Software architecture description and modeling of a service-oriented application plays a key role in providing the high level perspective, triggering the right refinement to the implementation, controlling the quality of services of products and offering large and general system properties. While several established and emerging standards bodies (e.g., [5, 4, 3, 1, 2] etc.) are rapidly laying out the foundations that the industry will be built upon, there are many research challenges behind service-oriented application architecture description languages that are less well-defined and understood [33] for the large number of web service application design and development. On the other hand, Unified Modeling Language (UML), a widely accepted object-oriented system modeling and design language, has been adapted for software architecture descriptions in recent years. Several research groups have used UML extension to describe the service-oriented application’s architecture ([7, 29]). However, it is hard to detect the system problems, such as correctness, consistency [30] etc., of the integration of Web services without a formal semantics of web services architecture. Currently, although a software architecture description using UML extension contains multiple viewpoints such as those proposed in the SEI model [39], the ANSI/IEEE P1471 standard, and the Siemens [31]. The component and connector (C&C) viewpoint [42], which addresses the dynamic system behavioral aspect, is essential and necessary for system property analysis.