Modeling Service Data Objects (SDOs) to the Entity-Relationship (ER) Model

In this paper the authors present a conceptual framework for translating Service Data Objects (SDOs) and XML’s SDOs to the Entity Relational (ER) Model. With the increasing dependence on service oriented architectures and the increasing need for SDOs in service oriented architectures (SOA), it is important to have a good understanding of SDOs in terms of the ER model so that SDOs can be easily converted to the relational model. In this paper they show how common SDO constructs and XML’s SDO constructs conceptually map to the ER model. DOI: 10.4018/jitwe.2012070102 International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering, 7(3), 14-36, July-September 2012 15 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. interfaces allowing consumers to know how to interact with them without having knowledge of the underlying platform (Erl, 2005). Services could be grouped together to form complex integrated processes and applications. Additions or modifications to the applications would be by adding/modifying services, independent of the application. Services could be added or removed dynamically at runtime (Baresi et al., 2003; Cotroneo et al., 2004). SOA will provide the basis for the next generation of distributed software systems (Mukhi et al., 2004). SOA has three parts: service providers, service requestors and service registry (Baresi et al., 2003; Champion et al., 2002; Mukhi et al., 2004; Nielsen et al., 2006). Service providers are the owners that offer a service. They provide machine readable descriptions of their services and publish them in a publicly available registry (Baresi et al., 2003; Champion et al., 2002; Mukhi et al., 2004), which the service requestors can access when looking for services. Services and components interact by exchanging messages. And, one of the most important components of any service is the data. SOA inherently deals with different kinds of data from heterogeneous data sources. One of the major challenges facing SOA in the last few years has been the need for an efficient data integration mechanism (Chen et al., 2006; Chen & Huang, 2006; Mukhi, 2004; Zhang et al., 2004) to efficiently handle data. Data relevant to today’s enterprise applications lives in a variety of information sources – relational databases, packaged applications and various home grown applications, and external Web Services (Borkar et al., 2006; Carey et al., 2003). In this paper our aim is to look at how data can be handled in the SOA environment with respect to service data objects (SDOs).