Service-Oriented Architecture: A Mapping Study

Service-oriented architecture has enjoyed great popularity in industry, academia, and science since its appearance about ten years ago. Many publications have tried to describe it and analyze different aspects of its implementation, adoption, and implication. They have reflected the complexity of the concept of SOA and fuelled the debate about its real contribution. However, there is limited work that studies how the field of research on SOA is evolving. As such, we proposed a mapping study to account for the nature of the research, developed subjects, application domains, standards, and technologies. Based on more than a hundred journal articles selected from the IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library databases over the period 2000-2013, our study revealed three themes, including system development and SOA application. A plethora of application domains, standards, and technologies are also identified, and confirm the ever-growing interest in SOA. We concluded by noting that organizational aspects, such as SOA governance, did not emerge, and we propose an extension of this study.