Models and Tools for SOA Governance

Organizations are moving rapidly towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Benefits include cost reduction through reuse, better integration through standardization, and new business opportunities through agility. The successful implementation of an SOA requires not only protocols and technologies like SOAP and WSDL but also support for the processes of creating, validating and managing services in an enterprise. Tools for SOA governance and management are evolving to be the heart of enterprise SOAs. We present an approach for supporting SOA governance activities. Notable aspects of our approach are an extensible model for describing service metadata of arbitrary service types (not only Web services), the concept of service proposals for the process of service specification and service creation, a service browser for service reuse, and support for service evolution through information about service versioning, service dependencies and service installations.