Inherence of Ratios for Service Identification and Evaluation

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) offer a conceptual and technical solution for many problems. However, the realization and even more the management of a SOA often remains a very hard task. A continuous evaluation of existing services and service candidates is necessary to implement, maintain and enhance a SOA. This is far from being trivial because of the semantic gap between requirements and technical implementations. Model-based solutions may offer a possibility to cope with the complexity of the necessary information, but a series of conflicts needs to be resolved especially for distributed modeling projects. These conflicts create several difficulties when trying to generate ratios that can measure the quality of a service or service candidate. This article presents an approach to generate ratios that are inherent to a service (candidate). Inherence means that the ratios are only dependent on the service and not on how the necessary information was modeled.