Methodological support for service-oriented design with ISDL

Currently, service-oriented computing is mainly technology-driven. Most developments focus on the technology that enables enterprises to describe, publish and compose application services, and to communicate with applications of other enterprises according to their service descriptions. In this paper, we argue that this technology should be complented with modelling languages, design methods and techniques supporting service-oriented design. We consider service-oriented design as the process of designing application support for business processes, using the service-oriented paradigm. We assume that service-oriented computing technology is used to implent application support. The paper presents two main contributions to the area of service-oriented design. First, a systatic service-oriented design approach is presented, identifying generic design milestones and a method for assessing the conformance between application designs at related abstraction levels. Second, a conceptual model for service-oriented design is presented that provides a common and precise understanding of the terminology used in service-oriented design. The ISDL modelling language is introduced to express service-oriented designs, based on this conceptual model. The paper includes an elaborate example to illustrate our ideas.