Business-oriented Service Identification Approach

Practitioners and vendors are now building application systems with business level services to better leverage business goals with SOA. The SOA characteristics such as reusability and loose coupling require the services with clear borders, unified interface functions and standard operating mode. It is fundamental to abstract widely accepted services from complex business processes. Therefore, the service identification is the key step in SOA. At present, the SOA research focuses on the design and implementation of SOA, mainly from the software technology level of service, not from the business level of service. The service description and definition are optional. The lack of standard service identification approach can result in lower reusable services and limit the advantages of SOA, however, due to the subjective nature of business activities specification and their complex relations, there still lack a sound normative business service identification approach.In this paper, we present a rule-based, business-oriented service identification approach. First the paper analyzes the current situation and existing problems for service identification, summarizes the influence factors for identification result. Then we present a UML based analyzing process for business service identification. The mainly steps include abstract key use cases, aggregate related use cases, align business functions to services using business rules, use reusability and stability to optimize the results and identify the components. Each step forward is rule restriction. At last we analyze a case study and use IBM Websphere business modeler to model the case. The result shows this approach is promising in analyzing business level services.