|
ASG Development Methodologies
ASG-based solutions consist of three main products: a service provisioning platform, services, and applications. Applications are the customer-specific solutions provided by a service-oriented organisation. Services are the core competencies as well as the outsourced competencies. The service provisioning platform manages the different services and provides them to the applications according to their specific requests.
ASG based solutions use semantic information to optimize the service management and provisioning. The following figure presents ASG based solutions that include the ASG service provisioning platform, ASG services, and ASG applications.
An ASG application uses the service provisioning functionality of the ASG platform to offer a customer-specific solution. The solution is described as a workflow in the application logic layer. Specific parts of the workflow are performed by services provided by the ASG service provisioning platform. According to the service requests including semantic information, the ASG service provisioning platform provides the optimal services. The service registry manages all services based on their semantic and syntactic service specification. The domain ontology is a formal and consensual specification of conceptualizations that provide a shared and common understanding of the registered ASG services. The ASG ontology is a meta-model defining the elements and their relationships used for the semantic service specification, syntactic service specification and the domain ontology.
Considering ASG based solutions three different software products are developed – a service provisioning platform, applications and services. In general, the life cycle of a product depends on the life of the product in the market with respect to business/commercial costs and sales measures.
The life cycle we describe is presented from the engineering point of view. It consists of three phases: development, maintenance and evolution, as well as retirement. The service-oriented solution life cycle consists of three sub life cycles:
- Platform life cycle describes the life cycle of a platform – the development, maintenance & evolution and retirement of the platform
- Application life cycle describes the life cycle of an application – the development, maintenance & evolution and retirement of the application.
- Service life cycle describes the life cycle of a service – the development, maintenance & evolution and retirement of the service.
Each life cycle is managed by the respective provider – platform provider, application provider or service provider. The providers are also responsible for coping with the possible dependencies among the life cycles.
The overall service-oriented solution life cycle is shown in the following figure:
The first phase in the service-oriented solution life cycle is the development of the ASG platform. Once the ASG platform is developed and running, new applications are developed or existing applications are evolved to use the ASG platform. Further, new services are developed or existing services are evolved to be registered at and provided by the ASG platform. The development of services is mainly triggered by the application development. In other words, the service-oriented solution development is more or less application driven. The platform, the ASG based applications as well as the ASG based services are evolved, maintained and retired as required by the platform, application and service provider.
Engineering ASG based solutions
In the ASG project, an integrated methodology was developed that covers platform, as well as service and application engineering.
Platform engineering aims at creating an infrastructure that implements the features needed to realize solutions based on adaptive services. More information can be found in the ASG Deliverable  ASG Platform Development Process*.
Application engineering supports the development of applications that use the ASG service provisioning platform to invoke services. The application domain concepts used in the application are thereby consolidated with the domain ontology of the respective ASG service provisioning platform. More information on application engineering for ASG based solutions can be found in the ASG Deliverable ASG Application and Service Engineering Approach* and with a focus on quality aspects in the ASG Deliverable ASG Quality Modelling Approach*.
Service engineering aims at developing services that can be registered in an ASG service provisioning platform so that they can be used in ASG based application. This specifically means that the resulting services are specified syntactically and semantically and that the concepts used in these specifications are consolidated with the respective ASG platform’s domain ontology. More information on service engineering for ASG services can be found in the ASG Deliverable ASG Application and Service Engineering Approach* and with a focus on quality aspects in the the ASG Deliverable ASG Quality Modelling Approach*.
|
