SOA4All will help to realize a world where a massive number of parties expose and consume services via advanced Web technology. The outcome of the project will be a framework and software infrastructure that aims at integrating SOA and four complementary and revolutionary technical advances (the Web, context-aware technologies, Web 2.0 and Semantic Web) into a coherent and domain independent worldwide service delivery platform.

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Incorporating Web principles into SOA

SOA4All aims at transforming service-oriented environments into architectures of billion of services. With this purpose it will integrate the principles which made the Web such a successful platform for the worldwide sharing of content.  SOA4All seeks that everybody could be able participate either as a provider or consumer of information beyond the boundaries of enterprises, meaning that different roles will be made possible depending on the circumstances, and also means that the provisioning and modification of services must be under the distributed control of peers rather than being controlled by a central authority.

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Incorporating Semantic Web into SOA

Service operations such as discovery, selection, composition, mediation and invocation in a world of numerous services need an advanced as self-managed as possible infrastructure. In order to achieve this we need to provide semantic descriptions for Web Services at many different levels, the creation of service locators based upon these descriptions and the creation of grounding mechanisms for invoking these services. It is important that all of these descriptions and services are tied together, allowing for seamless and dynamic location and invocation of Semantic Web Services.

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Incorporating context into SOA

SOA4All will incorporate context in SOA as a means to customize service usage and provisioning on a worldwide scale, customizing the consumption of a service from the user perspective and from the provider expectations. The mix of semantic and context technologies in the SOA4All infrastructure will be a key enabler of dynamic adaptation of services to their context of use. To facilitate the deployment of semantic services on a global scale, context will cover a series of aspects ranging from system and location information to social settings and legal regulations.

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Incorporating Web 2.0 into SOA

SOA4All will make use of Web 2.0 technology as means to generate and access the semantic service layer. Properly including human interaction and cooperation will enable us to provide solution to certain tasks such as service ranking or mediation that remain otherwise unfeasible. Web 2.0 and human computing approaches together with their underlying social consensus building mechanisms have proven the potential of proper balancing services provided by humans and services provided by automated reasoning. Web 2.0 will be mainly used for human interaction, but will also have an impact on ranking of services, deployment, context, composition, etc.

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