STraS: A framework for semantic traceability in enterprise-wide SOA life-cycle management

In recent years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted for enterprise application integration. A SOA not only promotes interoperable, loosely coupled enterprise applications; it also reduces the conceptual gap between business and IT. For SOA life-cycle management it is desirable that business processes can be traced to services and vice versa. However, this is usually not the case because many stakeholders and often more than one organization are involved in the SOA ecosystem. In addition, the various stakeholders employ their own vocabularies and formats. In this paper, we therefore recognize semantic traceability as the missing link between the two worlds and promote an integrated view on the various entities in the SOA life-cycle. First, we describe a SOA life-cycle model. Second, we propose the STraS traceability framework for end-to-end semantic traceability. Finally, we show how our approach contributes to the management of a SOA in business networks.