Design by contract is a well-established paradigm in software engineering. Bertrand Meyer first introduced the rigorous distinction between the responsibilities of service provider and service consumer for fine grain software artifacts (classes). This paper considers service contracts in the context of service-oriented architecture for complex enterprise information infrastructures. Identifying...

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) represent an architectural shift for building business applications based on loosely-coupled services. In a multi-layered SOA environment the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered can be formally specified by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, typical SLAs are just specified at the customer-level and do not allow service providers ...

Large enterprises need to coordinate the IT initiatives that exist in different organisational units of the enterprise. If these initiatives are not coordinated, the resulting IT system is likely to become difficult to use and expensive to develop/maintain. Enterprise architecture methods are designed for that purpose. We report on the use of a service-oriented enterprise architecture method, c...

SOA is a very important guiding theory in constructing information systems recently, the design granularity of information systems will gradually evolve from module to component. At first, this paper shows a SOA oriented information system architecture based on web services. Then it points out that getting web services reasonably and legally is the primary problem in the process of this archite...

Benefiting from the technology based strategies, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been able to achieve the general goals such as agility, flexibility, reusability and efficiency. Nevertheless, technical conditions alone cannot guarantee successful SOA implementations. As a valuable and necessary supplement, the space of technology independent strategies should also be explored. Through t...

The MISTRAL system, a service oriented architecture for semantic extraction of multimedia data from meeting recordings is described shortly. It improves on other similar systems by extracting a variety of semantic metadata from one media type and integrating it with concepts derived from other media types, as well as by adding inference capabilities to resolve ambiguities and further enrich ext...

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With software services becoming a strategic capability for the software sector, software architecture needs to address integration problems to help services to collaborate and coordinate their activities. The increasing need to address dynamic and automated changes can be answered by a service coordination architecture with event-based collaboration that enables dynamic and adaptive architectur...

Service-oriented architectures are widely discussed as a design principle for application and enterprise architectures. Nevertheless, an adequate granularity of services from an economical perspective has not yet been researched sufficiently. The finer the granularity to realize the functions of a process, the higher is the number of services and the more effort has to be spent to compose them....