SOAlive Service Catalog: A Simplified Approach to Describing, Discovering and Composing Situational Enterprise Services

SOAlive aims at providing a community-centric, hosted environment and, in particular, at simplifying the description and discovery of situational enterprise services via a service catalog. We argue that a service community has an impact not only on users and services, but also on the environment itself. Specifically, our position is that a service catalog adds value to users, and is itself enriched, by its incorporation into a community-centric service hosting environment. In addition, analyses of web services directories suggest that a catalog service for enterprise services can be better provided by using a simpler content model that better fits REST, taking advantage of collaborative practices to annotate catalog entries with informal semantic descriptions via tagging, providing a mechanism for embedding invocations of discovered services, and allowing syntactic descriptions to be refined via usage monitoring. The SOAlive service catalog defines a flexible content model, a discovery function that navigates the cloud of tag annotations associated with services in a Web 2.0 fashion, and a service description refinement function that allows the actual use of a service to refine the service description stored in the catalog.