A business model for deploying Web services: A data-centric approach based on factual dependencies

The standards XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI allow (i) services to be accessed and executed via the Web; and (ii) a loose coupling of these services. Thanks to these standards, Web services technology is becoming not only a de facto integration standard, but also a de facto Internet standard instance of the SOA architecture. However, the deployment of such a technology is still hindered by some technical as well as methodological issues. This paper proposes a business model with multiple interfaced abstraction levels as a framework to methodologically deploy Web services technology with respect to SOA architecture. The attributes describing the business objects and coordination artifacts as described in the highest abstraction level of the business model, i.e. the universe of discourse, are aggregated according to a time/space constraint called factual dependency. Each aggregation of factually dependent attributes is validated with regard to an actual business event. The aggregation is then interfaced to lead to a well-specified Web service. The resulting comprehensive set of consistent Web services are then registered in a public or a private UDDI to be discovered and invoked by any business process. The proposed Web services generation process aims at unlocking and turning informational assets into actions. It differs from the current IT perspective approaches that generate Web services directly from redundant and inconsistent elements in the enterprise information systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin 2005.