Service Oriented Computing: Service Foundations

The foundations of Service-Oriented Computing are concerned with the precise definition of a service. This is not only about providing a verbal explanation of what a service is, what can be and what cannot be considered a service, but rather it is about identifying the appropriate service model. Defining what service properties, requirements, and behaviors are relevant and possible for any generic service. Any task based on services has to then take into account the service model, in fact, it is shaped by the service model chosen. Think of service composition. In whichever way one wants to consider composition (static ad design-time, dynamic at execution time, etc.) one has to consider what are the basic blocks to build the composition out of. One has to know which properties and behaviors of the service are available to guarantee certain properties and behaviors of the composition. The remainder of this document is organized as follows. Section 1.1 identifies the architectural peculiarities of the service model. Section 1.2 presents the container model. Section 2 enumerates a number of challenges and open research issues on service foundations. The paper is concluded by Section 3 which is the proposal for a book part on service foundations within a book dealing with state of the art and open issues in Service-Oriented Computing.