Service-oriented Computing: An Opportunity for the Language-Action Perspective?

We argue that the recent move to service-oriented computing as a dominant paradigm presents an opportunity to the Language-Action community. Service-oriented computing emphasizes communication among independent services as the basic composition unit for application development. This view maps well against the basic premise underlying the Language-Action perspective that the basic unit of a software application is a communicative act. This core mapping presents an opportunity for this community to contribute to mainstream application development practices and technology development while providing theoretical leadership. A prerequisite to exploiting this opportunity is providing bridges from work on business modeling done in this community against the technology stack being developed for services-oriented computing. In this paper we provide a preliminary mapping between the two which points to opportunities and problems for conducting research following the Language-Action perspective. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proceedings of the 9th International Working Conference on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2004) Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, June 2-3, 2004 (M. Aakhus, M. Lind, eds.) www.scils.rutgers.edu/lap04/lap04.htm