Glossary
From PGFSOA Wiki
| Term | Source | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Adapter | Enterprise SOA | An intermediary service that bridges incompatible data formats between services and its clients. An adapter often also acts as a façade or technology gateway. |
| Authentication | IBM, Understanding SOA Security | The process of proving that the consumer legitimately has their claimed identity by evaluating additional information (authentication credentials) that is bound to this identity and can only be provided by a consumer with that identity. |
| Authorization | OASIS | The process of determining, by evaluating applicable access control information, whether a subject is allowed to have the specified types of access to a particular resource. Usually, authorization is in the context of authentication. |
| Best Practice | Benchmarking, The Search for Industry Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance | Best practices are a set of actions that solve a problem critical to business success most often found within organizations that excel against business and mission objectives. The capture of a “best practice” is traditionally coupled with measuring via benchmarking. Benchmarking gauges performance against leaders and seeks to find and describe practices that most heavily contribute. This reference is adapted from a classic text on benchmarking. |
| Business Process Management | Gartner | Provides governance of a business's process environment to improve agility and operational performance. |
| Capability | OASIS | A real-world effect that a service provider is able to provide to a service consumer. |
| Component | SCBA 2006 | Independently deployable unit of software that exposes its functionality through a set of services accessed via well-defined interfaces. A component is based on a component standard, is described by a specification, and has an implementation. Components can be assembled to create applications or larger-grained components. |
| Composite Application | OASIS | Applications that contain multiple services used in combination. |
| Consumption Service | OASIS | The process of interfacing with and utilizing the functionality of, and or providing functionality to, another Service Component. |
| Coupling | SCBA | Coupling is a measure of the level of interdependency between two components. “Loose Coupling” (low interdependence) is good, as it maximizes system flexibility. “Tight coupling” (high interdependence) is bad as it restricts system flexibility. |
| Community of Interest (COI) | Department of Defense (DoD) Guidance for COIs | A collaborative group of users who must exchange information in pursuit of their shared goals, interests, missions, or business processes and who therefore must have shared vocabulary for the information they exchange. |
| Design Pattern | - | See “Pattern.” |
| Development, Test, and Evaluation (DT&E) | Department of Defense Test And Evaluation Master Plan (May 2002) | Testing and evaluation conducted to evaluate design approaches, validate analytical models, quantify contract technical performance and manufacturing quality, measure progress in system engineering design and development, minimize design risks, predict integrated system operational performance in the intended environment, and identify system problems to allow for early and timely resolution or correction. |
| Discovery | W3 | The act of locating a service (specification) that meets certain functional criteria. It involves matching a set of functional and other criteria with a set of resource descriptions. |
| Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) | Bitpipe.com | An enterprise integration architecture that allows incremental integration driven by business requirements, not technology limitations. |
| Enterprise Architecture | CAF Glossary | (A) means— (i) a strategic information asset base, which defines the mission, (ii) the information necessary to perform the mission, (iii) the technologies necessary to perform the mission, and (iv) the transitional processes for implementing new technologies in response to changing mission needs; and (B) includes—(i) a baseline architecture, (ii) a target architecture, and (iii) a sequencing plan. |
| Federal Enterprise Architecture | www.egov.gov , FEA PMO Action Plan | The Federal Enterprise Architecture is an Office of Management and Budget initiative to comply with the Clinger-Cohen Act and provide a common methodology for information technology acquisition in the U. S. Federal Government. It is designed to ease sharing of information and resources across federal agencies, reduce costs, and improve citizen services.
The FEA consists of a set of interrelated reference models designed to facilitate cross-agency analysis and the identification of duplicative investments, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration within and across agencies. These include the Performance Reference Model, the Business Reference Model, the Service Component Reference Model, the Data Reference Model, and the Technical Reference Model. |
| Framework | CAF Glossary | A logical structure for classifying and organizing complex information. |
| Government Service Unit | - | A useful organization of government resources (staff, facilities, automated systems, etc.) viewed in a service perspective. |
| Granularity | SCBA 2006 | The size of the service or component under consideration. The term generally refers to the level of detail or abstraction of the service. |
| Harvesting | SCBA 2006 | (1) The process of evaluating and organizations businesses processes and IT assets in an effort to discover Service Components. (2) The process of repacking of useful business functionality as a Service Component. |
| Identity | IBM, Understanding SOA Security | A user or a consumer typically represented with a unique value or identifier. |
| Identity Token | IBM, Understanding SOA Security | A unique representation of the identity and attributes of the consumer in a standardized format. |
| Integrated Development Environment (IDE) | TechTarget | A programming environment that has been packaged as an application program, typically consisting of a code editor, a compiler, a debugger, and a graphical user interface (GUI) builder. The IDE may be a standalone application or may be included as part of one or more existing and compatible applications. |
| Interface, Component or Service | SCBA 2006 | Mechanism by which a component describes what it does and provides access to its services. This is important because it represents the “contract” between the supplier of services and the consumer of the services. |
| Loose Coupling | Service Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design | A condition wherein a service acquires knowledge of another service while remaining independent of that service. Achieved through the use of service contracts that allow services to interact within predefined parameters. Service contracts are what enable loose coupling between services, as the contract is the only piece of information required for services to interact. |
| Model Driven Architecture | IBM Service Oriented Architecture Compass | A software design methodology proposed and sponsored by OMG. Defines levels or abstract, platform independent models that can be used to generate more concrete models using an appropriate specification language. |
| Open Technology Development | Department of Defense OTD Roadmap Plan (April 2006) | A practice for development and implementation of current and next-generation software. Enabled by the Internet and
related technologies which enable distributed groups of programmers to collaboratively develop and manage code libraries in a decentralized fashion. The key elements of this approach are: 1. Open Standards and Interfaces 2. Open Source Software and Designs 3. Collaborative and Distributed Online Tools 4. Technological Agility |
| Pattern | Gartner | A pattern is a design idea that can be reused and leveraged across the enterprise. They are blueprints that identify components at a design or logical level (for example, a data server or an application server), and show the roles, interactions, and relationships of components at that level. |
| Process Model | OASIS | The characterization of the temporal relationships between and temporal properties of actions and events associated with interacting with the service. |
| Provisioning | Services
Provisioning Markup Language Specification | The automation of all the steps required to manage (setup, amend, and revoke) user or system access entitlements or data relative to electronically published services. |
| Registry | SCBA 2006 | A database providing information describing and categorizing objects, but which does not contain the objects themselves. Registries usually provide information as to how to access the objects they describe. |
| Repository | SCBA 2006 | A storage mechanism; typically a storage and retrieval mechanism for components and service information. |
| Reuse | SCBA 2006 | Any use of a pre-existing software artifact (component, specification, etc.) in a context different from that in which it was created. |
| Security Architecture | OASIS | A plan and set of principles for an administrative domain and its security domains that describe the security services that a system is required to provide to meet the needs of its users, the system elements required to implement the services, and the performance levels required in the elements to deal with the threat environment. |
| Security Service | OASIS | A processing or communication service that is provided by a system to give a specific kind of protection to resources, where said resources may reside with said system or reside with other systems, for example, an authentication service or a PKI-based document attribution and authentication service. |
| Semantic Data Model | IBM | Defines the standard business data objects for a given enterprise (such as customer, agreement, and so on). These objects effectively create an ontology of the enterprise data by defining common concepts and their content, which describe the functioning of the enterprise. Using this data model for defining the business services interfaces leads to the creation of interoperable semantic service interface definitions--a semantic SOA. |
| Service | OASIS | The means by which the needs of a consumer are brought together with the capabilities of a provider. |
| Service Component | SCBA 2006 | A self-contained business process or service with predetermined and well-defined functionality that may be exposed through a well defined and documented business or technology interface. Well-designed Service Components are “loosely coupled” and collaborate primarily by exchanging messages. |
| Service Contract | Enterprise SOA | Describes a service in a technology independent way. It specifies the functionality, purpose, usage, and constraints of the service. |
| Service Interface | OASIS | The means by which the underlying capabilities of a service are accessed. |
| Service Level Agreement (SLA) | SCBA 2006 | A contract or memorandum of agreement between a service provider and a customer that specifies, usually in measurable terms, what services the service provider will furnish. Information technology departments in major enterprises have adopted the idea of writing a service level agreement so that services for their customers (users in other departments within the enterprise) can be measured, justified, and perhaps compared with those of external (sourcing) service providers. |
| Service Level Management | Gartner | The ongoing process of using service-level agreements (SLAs) to maintain high quality in the provision of services — and to ensure that service-level objectives (SLOs) and performance meet the changing needs of the recipient's business — through continuous improvement of service activities, functions, and processes. |
| Service Level Objective | Gartner | A goal defined in a service-level agreement (SLA). SLOs are the objectives that must be achieved — for each service activity, function and process — to provide the best opportunity for service recipient success. |
| Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) | OASIS | Service Oriented Architecture is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations. |
| Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE) | IDG | A business-driven architectural framework that defines and exposes an organization’s core business processes to the external market through the use of standardized open technology in the form of services. |
| Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) | IDG | A service-driven infrastructure that provides a common and shared set of technologies that enable business processes to be added and changed readily. |
| Service Provider | OASIS | An entity (person or organization) that offers the use of capabilities by means of a service. |
| SOA Governance | BPTrends | An instance of IT governance with some refinement in IT processes and controls as required by particular enterprise needs across all phases of the enterprise SOA initiatives such as SOA Strategy, SOA Plan and Define, service-oriented analysis and design, SOA implementation, SOA testing, SOA deployment, etc. |
| SOA Management | BPTrends | Includes IT processes, services, and software/tools for managing and monitoring SOA composite applications and supporting infrastructure based on enterprise governance practices that are in accordance with business goals. |
| SOAP | CAF Glossary | Simple Object Access Protocol - A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification that facilitates the interoperability between a broad mixture of programs and platforms. |
| SOA Roadmap | For the purposes of this guide. | a structured SOA implementation plan for managed adoption based on best practices. |
| Solution Assembly | SCBA 2006 | Process of implementing a solution by assembling the necessary services into a complete solution. This process often involves additional “glue” code to integrate the assembled components. |
| Test Harness | SCBA 2006 | Software that automates the software testing process to test software services or components as thoroughly as possible before using them on a real application. |
| UDDI | CAF Glossary | Universal Description, Discovery and Integration is a an online directory that gives businesses and organizations a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services and understand the methods required to conduct business with a specific company. |
| Unified Modeling Language (UML) | IBM Service Oriented Architecture Compass | An accepted OMG standard visual language for specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of systems. |
| Use Case | Jacobson92 | A use case is a narrative document that describes the sequence of events of an actor (an external agent) using a system to complete a process. |
| Web Service | SCBA 2006 | Specific method of implementing a service, using the Internet (XML, TCP/IP) as the transport mechanism and conforming to a specific set of standards (WSDL, SOAP, etc). Can be internally provided or can be offered externally. |
| Wrapping | SCBA 2006 | Isolating the code to create an independently deployable unit of software and creating an interface around legacy code that exposes functionality as services via interfaces that conform to a component specification. |
| Web Services Description Language (WSDL) | CAF Glossary | Web Services Description Language is a specification that is published to a UDDI directory. WSDL provides interface/implementation details of available web services and UDDI Registrants. It leverages XML to describe data types, details, interface, location, and protocols. |
| XML | CAF Glossary | Extensible Markup Language is a non-proprietary subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). It is focused on data structure and uses tags to specify the content of the data elements in a document. |
