SOA4All defines its terminology starting from the NEXOF-RA glossary. The NEXOF-RA glossary is a selection of terms that is being prepared by the NEXOF-RA project, in cooperation with NESSI related projects, and is intended to form a common glossary across the projects and beyond. It takes many of its definitions from established standards or pseudo standards. These terms concern various aspects of the service lifecycle ranging from requirement analysis to operation.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

• Access: The act of interacting with a system.

• Access Control: Protection of resources against unauthorized access; a process by which use of resources is regulated according to a security policy and is permitted by only authorized system entities according to that policy. [W3C_2004a]

• Access Control Information: 1. Any information used for access control purposes, including contextual information. 2. Contextual information might include source IP address, encryption strength, the type of operation being requested, time of day, etc. Portions of access control information may be specific to the request itself, some may be associated with the connection via which the request is transmitted, and others (for example, time of day) may be "environmental". [W3C_2004a]

• Access Rights: A description of the type of authorized interactions a subject can have with a resource. Examples include read, write, execute, add, modify, and delete. [W3C_2004a]

• Accessibility: A service is accessible for an actor if the actor can access it. Accessibility implies that the service is available and network connectivity enables the actor to interact with the service.

• Actor: 1. A person or organization that may be the owner of agents that either seek to use services or provide services. 2. A physical or conceptual entity that can perform actions. Examples: people; companies; machines; running software. An actor can take on (or implement) one or more roles. An actor at one level of abstraction may be viewed as a role at a lower level of abstraction.

• Agent: An agent is a program acting on behalf of a person or organization. [W3C_2004a]

• Application Artifact: See Artifact

• Application Service Provider: An Application Service Provider (ASP) is a organisation that offers individuals or organisations access over the Internet to applications and related Software Services that would otherwise have to be located in their own personal or enterprise computers.

• Architecture: The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution. [IEEE_2007a]

• Artifact: The specification of a physical pieco of information that is used or produced by a software development process, such as an external document or a work procduct, or by the development or operation of a system. An artifact can be a model, description or software. [Rumbaugh_et_al_2005a]

• Atomic Service: An Atomic Service is a service that does not invoke other services.

• Authentication: Authentication is the process of verifying that a potential partner in a conversation is capable of representing a person or organization. [W3C_2004a]

• Authorization: The process of determining, by evaluating applicable access control information, whether a subject is allowed to have the specified types of to a particular resource. Usually, authorization is in the context of authentication. Once a subject is authenticated, it may be authorized to perform different types of access. [W3C_2004a]

• Autonomic System: An autonomic computing system is a system able to configure itself in the face of a changing environment.

• Availability: Proportion of the time in which the system is operational, and satisfies its specification. It is quantified as the uptime divided the uptime+downtime.

B

• Binding: An association between an interface and a concrete implementation. A binding specifies the protocol and data format to be used in transmitting messages, defined by the associated interface, to a specific endpoint.

• Business Activity: A business activity is used to represent the state of the business process of one of the partners. [EBXML_2001a]

• Business Entity: Something that is accessed, inspected, manipulated, produced, and worked on in the business. [EBXML_2001a]

• Business Partners: An entity that engages in business transactions with another business partner(s). [EBXML_2001a]

• Business Process: A Business Process is a collaborative service that is closely linked to a business purpose.

• Business Process Description: Specifies an activity graph that includes a set of activities as well as their relationships.

• Business Process Context: Defines a context in which a business has chosen to employ an information entity. [EBXML_2001a]

• Business Process Library: A repository of business process specifications and business information objects within an industry, and of common business process specifications and common business information objects that are shared by multiple industries. [EBXML_2001a]

• Business Process Modelling: The activity of analysing and designing the structure of business processes and the resources needed to implement them.

C

• Capability: See Service Capability

• Choreography: See Service Choreography

• Clustering: The use of multiple components that as a whole appear as a single highly available component. Collaborative Service A Collaborative Service is a service implemented through the composition of services. These composed services in turn involve any kind of service.

• Component: See Software Component

• Composite Service: A Composite Service is a software service implemented through the composition of software services.

• Composition: See Service Composition

• Concept: A concept is an element of a semantic model. This specification makes no assumptions about the nature of concepts, except that they must be identifiable by URIs. A concept can for example be a classifier in some language, a predicate logic relation, the value of the property of an ontology instance, some object instance or set of related instances, an axiom, etc. [W3C_2007a]

• Confidentiality: Ensuring, that information is accessible only to those authorized to have access.

• Conformance: Fulfilment of a product, process or service of all requirements specified; adherence of an implementation to the requirements of one or more specific standards or technical specifications. [EBXML_2001a]

• Credentials: Data that is transferred to establish a claimed principal identity. [W3C_2004a]

D

• Dependability: The trustworthiness of a computing system which allows reliance to be justifiably placed on the service it delivers. It is also used as the collective term gathering the following attributes or non-functional requirements: availability, reliability, maintainability, safety, and security.

• Deployment: See Service Deployment

• Design Time: Comprises all activities that a service provider has to perform prior to the provision of a service. The design time ends with the agreement on an SLA.

• Digital Signature: A digital code that can be attached to an electronically transmitted message that uniquely identifies the sender. [EBXML_2001a]

E

• Encryption: Cryptographic transformation of data (called "plaintext") into a form (called "ciphertext") that conceals the data's original meaning to prevent it from being known or used. [W3C_2004a]

• End Point: An association between a binding and a network address, specified by a URI, that may be used to communicate with an instance of a service. An end point indicates a specific location for accessing a service using a specific protocol and data format. [W3C_2004a]

• Enterprise Grid: The evolution of scientific grids to deal with business applications, typically, online, stateful, and transactional, in enterprise environments such as multi-tier systems.

• Enterprise Service Bus: An ESB is a standards-based integration platform that combines messaging, web services, data transformation, andintelligent routing to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of significant numbers of diverse applications across extended enterprises with transactional integrity. [Chappell_2004a]

• Error: 1. The difference between a computed, observed, or measured value or condition and the true, specified, or theoretically correct value or condition. For example, a difference of 30 meters between a computed result and the correct result. 2. An incorrect step, process, or data definition. For example, an incorrect instruction in a computer program. 3. An incorrect result. For example, a computed result of 12 when the correct result is 10. 4. A human action that produces an incorrect result. For example, an incorrect action on the part of the programmer or operator. [IEEE_1990a]

F

• Failure: The inability of a system or component to perform its required functions within specified performance requirements. [IEEE_1990a]

• Fault: 1. A defect in a hardware device or component; for example, a short circuit or broken wire. 2. An incorrect step, process, or data definition in a computer program. [IEEE_1990a]

• Fault avoidance: Techniques to identify and repair incorrect operation prior to releasing a system. These techniques include formal methods, automated design, best practices, and testing.

• Fault tolerance: 1. The ability of a system or component to continue normal operation despite the presence of hardware or software faults. 2. The number of faults a system or component can withstand before normal operation is impaired. 3. Pertaining to the study of errors, faults, and failures, and of methods for enabling systems to continue normal operation in the presence of faults. [IEEE_1990a]

• Functionality Execution: See Service Provisioning

• Functional Requirement: A requirement that specifies a function that a system or system component must be able to perform. [IEEE_1990a]

G

• Gateway: A gateway encapsulates a consuming application's access to some external system.

• Governance: A concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in an SOA.

• Grid System: A middleware for parallel computing over a network of computers typically for computationally intensive applications processed in batches.

I

• Integrity: Assuring information will not be accidentally or maliciously altered or destroyed. [W3C_2004a]

L

• Latency: The delay between the triggering of an action and the perception of the effects of such action. When applied to a service invocation latency is equivalent to response time.

• Loose Coupling: Loose coupling is the characteristic of software systems, in which dependencies among its constituting parts have been minimized.

M

• Maintainability: The ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be performed in accordance with prescribed requirements.

• Mashup: A graphical lightweight process (composite service) description, described as an aggregation of individual graphical services (both WSDL and RESTful ones) connected through a simple data flow (which implicitly offers a basic workflow as well).

• Multimodal Interface: A multimodal interface is a Human-machine interface which combines several communications between the user and the machine. The examples most often used are the combination of the gesture and the word (“Put that here”, accompanied with a appointment gesture). Multi-modal user interface supports multiple ways of interaction between the user and the system in terms of communication channels that correspond to human senses. Depending on the implementation, a multi-modal user interface can utilise these channels as various input and output modalities in sequential and/or parallel manner. In addition, biomedical data (passively) available from the user can also be part of a multi-modal user interface.

N

• NEXOF Reference Architecture: The NEXOF reference architecture consists of the NEXOF reference architecture model and the NEXOF reference architecture specification.

• NEXOF Reference Architecture Model: The NEXOF reference architecture model describes the essential elements of SOA-based systems, including its actors, information, processes and relationships between these elements (e.g., constraints). The NEXOF reference architecture model is a conceptual model that is technology neutral, application-domain independent and business-scale independent.

• NEXOF Reference Architecture Specification: The NEXOF reference architecture specification provides software architecture design patterns to effectively guide and support the construction of coherent, consistent and interoperable SOA-based systems. It is guided by the NEXOF reference architecture model.

• Non-functional Requirement: A non-functional requirement specifies a particular quality of the system rather than a function of the system. Two kinds of non-functional requirements are typically distinguished: 1. Execution qualities observable at run-time such as security, availability, reliability, etc.; 2. Evolution qualities observable at design time such as scalability and extensibility.

• Non-functional Property: See Quality of Service

• Non-repudiation: Method by which the sender of data is provided with proof of delivery and the recipient is assured of the sender's identity, so that neither can later deny having processed the data. [W3C_2004a]

O

• Ontology: An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. [Gruber_1993a]

• Operation: A set of messages related to a single service action. [W3C_2004a]

• Orchestration: See Service Orchestration

P

• Party: See Actor

• Performability: Performability is a composite measure for a system's performance and its dependability. Quantification of the tradeoff between performance and dependability attributes. Ability of a highly available system to be performant.

• Performance: A quantification of the goodness of the service provided by a system. Performance involves metrics such as response time, throughput, reliability, etc.

• Permission: A permission is a kind of policy that prescribes the allowed actions and states of an agent and/or resource. [W3C_2004a]

• Policy: A policy is a constraint on the behavior of agents or person or organization. [W3C_2004a]

• Principal: A system entity whose identity can be authenticated. [W3C_2004a]

• Process: Within WP6 a process is an executable composite service realizing a user-specific business process, described as an orchestration of activities performed by bound external services and/or described by SOA4All Light Goals, through a complex enough work and data flow.

• Provider: Agrees SLAs with requesters and makes services available to them in compliance with the SLA.

• Provider Agent: An Agent that is capable of and empowered to perform the actions associated with a service on behalf of its owner — the provider entity. [W3C_2004a]

• Provider Entity: The person or organization that is providing a service.

Q

• Quality of Service: Quality of Service is a set of quantifiable quality properties of a service.

R

• Reference Architecture: A reference architecture is an architectural design pattern that indicates how an abstract set of mechanisms and relationships realizes a predetermined set of requirements.

• Registry: A mechanism whereby relevant repository items and metadata about them can be registered such that a pointer to their location, and all their metadata, can be retrieved as a result of a query. [EBXML_2001a]

• Reliability: The ability of a service to perform a required function under stated conditions for a specified period of time.

• Requester: Agrees SLAs with providers, ensures the services address the correct business requirements, and provides funds for using services.

• Requester Agent: A software agent that wishes to interact with a provider agent in order to request that a task be performed on behalf of its owner — the requester entity. [W3C_2004a]

• Requester Entity: The person or organization that wishes to use a provider entity's service.

• Requirement: A condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective. [Pohl_et_al_2005a]

• Repository: A location or set of distributed locations where Repository Items, pointed at by the registry, reside and from which they can be retrieved. [EBXML_2001a]

• Response time: The time perceived by a requester of a service between the instant at which the service invocation is performed and the instant at which the response to the invocation is received.

• Role: See Service Role

• Runtime: Comprises the provision of a service starting with the agreement on an SLA.

S

• Safety: The condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable. [Wikipedia_2008a]

• Scalability: A desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged

• Scale Out: The ability of a distributed system to increase its computing capacity (i.e., increase its throughput) by adding more nodes.

• Scale Up: The ability of single node system to increase its computing capacity (i.e., increase its throughput) adding more resources, such as CPUs, memory, disks etc.

• Security: Covers aspects of authentication, authorisation, confidentiality, integrity, non-repudation, and protection from denial-of-service attacts.

• Security Model: A schematic description of a set of entities and relationships by which a specified set of security services are provided by or within a system. [EBXML_2001a]

• Self-* Properties: Properties of an autonomic system including: self-configuration, self-healing, self-management, self-optimization, self-protection, self-provisioning, self-repairing, self-tuning.

• Self-configuration: A system able to configure itself without human assistance.

• Self-healing: A system able to repair itself in the advent of failures.

• Self-management: The ability of a system to manage itself without human assistance except for providing high level goals.

• Self-optimization: A system able to chose a quasi-optimal configuration to maximize some utility function.

• Self-protection: A system able to protect itself from internal and external threats.

• Self-provisioning: A clustered system able to grow and shrink as needed in the face of changing loads and workloads minimizing the utilized resources whilst satisfying the required performance metrics.

• Self-repairing: See Self-healing

• Self-tuning: See Self-optimization

• Semantic Annotation: A semantic annotation in a document is additional information that identifies or defines a concept in a semantic model in order to describe part of that document. In SAWSDL, semantic annotations are XML attributes added to a WSDL or associated XML Schema document, at the XML element they describe. Semantic annotations are of two kinds: explicit identifiers of concepts, or identifiers of mappings from WSDL to concepts or vice versa. [W3C_2007a]

• Semantic Model: A semantic model is a set of machine-interpretable representations used to model an area of knowledge or some part of the world, including software. Examples of such models are ontologies that embody some community agreement, logic-based representations, etc. Depending upon the framework or language used for modelling, different terminologies exist for denoting the building blocks of semantic models. [W3C_2007a]

• Semantics: Semantics in the scope of this specification refers to sets of concepts identified by annotations. [W3C_2007a]

• Service: A service is an abstract entity consisting of a set of capabilities offered by one or more providers to consumers. The service is provided by means of consumer service requests. The capabilities of the service and information how to use these capabilities are described in a service description. It can be realized by living beings, information systems, machines, etc.

• Service Aggregation: See Service Composition

• Service Aggregator: A client application that automatically pipelines the services needed to retrieve a requested result.

• Service Behaviour: The observable effects of an operation or event, including its results. [EBXML_2001a]

• Service Capability: A Service Capability is the functionality offered by a service, including quality of the service.

• Service Choreography: A Service Choreography is the specification of interactions among a set of services, described from a global perspective.

• Service Cluster: See Service Composition

• Service Composition: Service Composition is the act of executing a service coordination.

• Service Contract: The service contract is a formal, agreed, binding contract between a service consumer and a service provider.

• Service Coordination: Service Coordination is the interaction among services. Coordination can be described in one of two forms: orchestration or choreography.

• Service Deployment: All of the activities that make a service available for use.

• Service Description: A service description is a set of documents that describe the interface, the accessibility and the capability of a service.

• Service Discovery: An activity of finding and identifying a service that might fulfil user requirements.

• Service Execution: The process for delivering operational services to the service consumer.

• Service Implementation: The core business logic written in a specific language. [Margolis_2007a]

• Service Interaction: A situation where a combination of these services behaves differently than expected from the single service behaviours.

• Service Interface: The service interface is the specification of how to perform service requests.

• Service Intermediary: A service intermediary is a Web service whose main role is to transform messages in a value-added way. (From a messaging point of view, an intermediary processes messages en route from one agent to another.) Specifically, we say that a service intermediary is a service whose outgoing messages are equivalent to its incoming messages in some application-defined sense. [W3C_2004a]

• Service Life Cycle: Comprises the design-time, runtime, and retirement of a service.

• Service Monitoring: An activity that provides an awareness of the state of a service.

• Service Orchestration: A Service Orchestration is the description of how a specific service can be realised by interacting with other services. The orchestration is under control of a single endpoint. An Orchestration may be executable.

• Service-Oriented Architecture: Service-Oriented Architecture is an architectural style, based on services.

• Service-Oriented Infrastructure: Service-oriented infrastructure results from applying the principles of service orientation to IT infrastructure. [TheOpenGroup_2007a]

• Service Provider: See Provider

• Service Provisioning: Service provisioning is the execution of a functionality offered by a service in order to satisfy a specific request from a consumer. It can be regulated by an agreement.

• Service Publication: Any action to expose the service description.

• Service Registry: See Registry

• Service Repository: See Repository

• Service Requester: See Requester

• Service Role: An abstract set of tasks which is identified to be relevant by a person or organization offering a service. Service roles are also associated with particular aspects of messages exchanged with a service. [W3C_2004a]

• Service Supply: Service provisioning is the execution of a functionality offered by a service in order to satisfy a specific request from a consumer. It can be regulated by an agreement.

• SLA: The SLA is a formal, agreed, binding contract between a service consumer and a service provider constraining the quality of service.

• SLA Negotiation: An activity to determine certain details of an interaction.

• Software Architecture: The software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprises software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them. [Bass_et_al_2003a]

• Software as a Service: A software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to requester over a network, typically the Internet. [Searchcrm_2008a]

• Software Component: A software component is a software unit of deployment that encapsulates a state and defines its behaviour in terms of provided and required interfaces.

• Software Product Line: A set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment, and that are developed from a common set of domain artefacts in a prescribed way. [Kaekoela_Lopez_2006a]

• Software Service: A Software Service is a special service which can be accessed by the service consumer only via a piece of software. This software constitutes the interface between the service consumer and the software service. It does not determine whether the service is realized by a human or a piece of software. The interfaces to human services are proxies to enable an interaction with the human.

• Static Composition: See Service Orchestration

T

• Throughput: A performance metrics that measures the rate per unit of time of processed work (processed services, routed packets, etc.).

• Transaction: An agreement, communication, or movement carried out between separate entities or objects, often involving the exchange of items of value, such as information, goods, services and money.

U

• User: A user is a human actor.

V

• Virtualisation: Technique for abstracting physical resources into logical resources. Virtualisation can split a physical resource into multiple logical resources or pool multiple physical resources into a single logical resource.

• Vulnerability: A flaw or weakness in a system's design, implementation, or operation and management that could be exploited to violate the system's security policy. [EBXML_2001a]

W

• Web Service: A Web Service is a software service designed to support interoperable XML based machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). [W3C_2004a]

• Workflow: The sequence of activities performed in a business that produces a result of observable value to an individual actor. [EBXML_2001a]

• Workflow Description: See Service Orchestration

References

• [Allen_2005a] Allen, P.: Service Orientation: The Business Process Dimension, 2005.
• [Bass_et_al_2003a] Bass, L.; Clements, P. & Kazman, R.: Software Architecture in Practice. (SEI Series in Software Engineering) Addison-Wesley Longman, 2nd edition, Amsterdam, 2003.
• [Chappell_2004a] Chappell, D. A.: Enterprise Service Bus. O'Reilly Media, 2004.
• [EBXML_2001a] Team, T. A.: ebXML Glossary 2001.
• [Gruber_1993a] Gruber, T. R.: A translation approach to portable ontology specifications Knowl. Acquis., Academic Press Ltd., 1993, 5, 199-220
• [IEEE_1990a] IEEE: IEEE standard glossary of software engineering terminology IEEE Std 610.12-1990, 1990.
• [IEEE_2007a] IEEE: Systems and software engineering - Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems ISO/IEC 42010 IEEE Std 1471-2000, 2007-07-15.
• [Kaekoela_Lopez_2006a] Käkölä, T. & López, J. C. D.: Software Product Lines. Research Issues in Engineering and Management Springer, Berlin, 2006.
• [Margolis_2007a] Margolis, B.: SOA for the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA (Business Developers series) Mc Press, 2007.
• [Pohl_et_al_2005a] Pohl, K.; Böckle, G. & van der Linden, F.: Software Product Line Engineering. Foundations, Principles, and Techniques. Springer, Berlin, 2005.
• [Rumbaugh_et_al_2005a] Rumbaugh, J.; Jacobson, I.; Booch, G.: The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2005.
• [Searchcrm_2008a] http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci1170781,00.html. 
• [TheOpenGroup_2007a] The Open Group: Service-Oriented Infrastructure Project Description, Version 1.1, July 2007.
• [W3C_2004a] W3C: Web Services Glossary 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-gloss/.
• [W3C_2007a] W3C: Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema – Terminology. http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/sawsdl/spec/#Terminology. 
• [Wikipedia_2008a] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety.