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A new white paper from the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) defines a baseline of terms important for anyone looking into service-oriented architecture (SOA).

In the paper, Getting Started with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Terminology, Grace Lewis defines core SOA terms such as services, service consumers, and SOA infrastructure. Lewis also describes the three basic operations that support service-oriented systems (service discovery, service composition, and service invocation) and two common implementation technology patterns (Web Services and REpresentational State Transfer or REST).

Creating a baseline of terminology for SOA is important, Lewis writes, because SOA is currently the best option available for systems integration and the leveraging of legacy systems. A common SOA terminology supports such key implementation activities as understanding where a service-oriented approach is appropriate, selecting technologies, and identifying which parts of the system will come “out-of-the box” and which will have to be built.

Grace Lewis is an SEI researcher who has led the way in developing an SOA research agenda, as well as SOA technologies and SOA training courses.

This white paper is available at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/whitepapers/startwithsoa.cfm.