A Platform Independent Model for Service Oriented Architectures

To achieve interoperability at an implementation level, enterprises must overcome several difficulties, such as incompatible platforms and evolving technologies. Fortunately, during the last ten years the software industry has been collaborating to solve some of those problems. The main achievement in this field is the introduction of a set of technologies, mainly web service based, which enable enterprises to implement service oriented architectures (SOA) to achieve interoperability. SOA has the advantage of exposing the business functionalities decoupled from their implementation. However, for the difficulties stated above, we require abstraction mechanisms to split the logical solution from its technical implementation, which enables the definition of service architectures independently from the used specific platforms. This paper proposes a metamodel for SOA providing a language for describing SOA solutions independently from their technical implementation, as a way to better support interoperability among an enterprise and its partners.