SOAML — There is no convenient way to summarize what services a participant produces and consumes

SoaML uses service and request ports to indicate what services a participant provides and consumes. But many other SOA modeling approaches such as Archimate, TOGT SOA Reference Architecture, and the IBM SOMA method show more summary views indicating components that realize and use services without indicating the details of what port the service is actually provided or consumed on.

UML2 derives the provided and required interfaces of a component from the interfaces the component realizes and uses directly, as well as the ones it realizes and uses indirectly through the types of its owned ports. SoaML should extend this to include provided and required services based on service and request ports typed by a ServiceInterface. It should be possible to view the Participant as realizing the provided ServiceInterfaces and using the required ServiceInterfaces to provide a high-level overview of the relationship between the definition of a service and the compoents that provide and consume them.

The relationship between port types, ports and encapsulated classifiers is under discussion for future changes in UML. SoaML should not introduce modeling notation extensions that may create additional confusion or result in possible inconsistencies.

These high-level overviews can also be supported using Capabilities.

Discussion:

Actions taken: Closed, no change