OWL-SOA: A service oriented architecture ontology useful during development time and independent from implementation technology

The implementation of service oriented architecture (SOA) has proven to be one of the main initiatives for organizations in gaining necessary agility in the area of information technology. However, in one particular area this process has presented a significant challenge: the implementation of a service catalog. Ontologies have been used to organize services in repositories, as proposed by of OWL-S (Ontology Web Service Language) and WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology). Meanwhile, these ontologies have two broad restrictions: they are used on runtime only, and deal only with Web Service technology for the implementation of services. This study proposes an ontology for SOA with an emphasis on the implementation of a service catalog in the development phase, and considering any type of service implementation technology. This ontology was created based on the existing ontologies and literature. The resulting ontology was instanced with services of a large multinational organization.