Service Meta-data

Abstract

Service meta-data plays the crucial role in the process of service specification. They can help companies to create transparent categorization of the services which is leading to more efficient methods of service searching and understanding their meaning and relevance. In the paper is presented an example of service meta-data usage for visualization of the service execution context. Visualization process uses service associations gathered from information flow and provides a tool for depicting the impact of the service changes on the surrounding environment. Life-cycle model of delivering IS in SOA defined in Hauptvogel (2013a) consists of stages, which are described in detail in the PhD thesis. Each phase includes the description of the output elements which are also called service meta-data. These output elements can be used for definition of the service execution context. For context definition is crucial identification phase from the life-cycle model of delivering IS in SOA, because it is modeled in the contextual layer. It also defines the business entities which are associated to the service. Meta-data used for service execution context handling should be recorded in the service catalog. Handling of the context is necessary for the subsequent service categorization. The aim of this paper is to describe the importance of the meta-data usage in the process of delivering services. In the thesis Hauptvogel (2013b) has been proposed to derive the structure of the meta-data from the various phases of the life-cycle model of delivering IS in SOA. This structure forms the basis for categorization of services.