Service Identification in Interorganizational Process Design

Abstract

Service identification is one of the main phases in the design of a service-oriented application. The way in which services are identified may influence the effectiveness of the SOA architecture. More specifically, the granularity of the services is very important in reaching flexibility and reusing them. Such properties are crucial in interorganizational interactions based on collaborative business processes. In fact, collaboration is facilitated by ensuring a homogeneous description of services at the right level of granularity. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of P2S (Process-to-Services), a computer-aided methodology to enable the identification of services that compose a collaborative business process. The methodology is based on metrics defined to setup service granularity, cohesion, coupling, and reuse. A prototype tool based on the methodology is also described with reference to a real case scenario.