Working toward the SOA Reference Model

The SOA Reference Model TC is gearing up for the Face to Face meeting in Vienna Austria next week. The goal is to finalize the current working draft and elevate the draft to committee status by the end of the meeting. This is tremendous news because it means we are one step closer to a voluntary consensus standard that examines the key concepts and relationships between them for service oriented architecture - not product driven, not web service standards driven, not even software driven, but motivated to understand the essence of service and SOA.

I spent some time last night reading linguistic research to try and better understand what about the relationship between noun and verb forms of ‘service’ are sticking points for me. As I suspected; it has to with the implications about the relationships between these lexical forms. What was most interesting was to realize the variety of aspects to be considered. However, I think that I found what makes me want to tread careful and clearly understand and distinguish between service as a noun and service as a verb.

One of my colleagues, Chris Bashioum, used the wording 'the RM concept of service maps to a concrete "thing" called a service, that performs the action of bringing a desired capability to bear when invoked in the context of an SOA. This wording pointed out to me that there are two active portions of the ‘service scenario’:

1) That ‘of bringing a desired capability to bear’
2) That of the capability itself

Referring to a service as a concrete "thing" is essentially an abstract noun which performs the work of an active verb. Nominalization allows us write about a process or action and yet not mention who is involved. Again, this is part of the sticking point for me when it comes to a reference model in which we’re trying to unambiguously define key concepts – because we’re using terminology that permits us to unintentionally cloud the concepts when we are seeking clarity.

So I dug a bit further and discovered that there are many ‘types’ of nominalizations, including ‘episodic nominalizations.’ An episodic nominalization takes an active process and conceives it as a noun. So far so good, for service as both noun and verb. However, here’s where I found some interesting information about the intuition of language that is captured by these different forms. Although quite similar, these two forms represent adifferent semantics which conceptually develop. In an episodic nominalization, the conception is no longer viewed as a process but rather as a single episode (i.e. only as the sum rather than the sum of its parts). Yes this starts to get into cognitive psychology and linguistics ( and I apologize to those who just want to know what does the word service mean within the context of SOA but bear with me).

Where I got to is that yes, we may actually be talking about the same thing when we use service as an act and as an object - only we're looking at the concept from different angles. What I’m recognizing is that those angles come with specific inferences and assumptions that stem from language itself that we may not be explicitly aware of and which set up confusion.

So what am I saying? That the text in the draft works well to recognize that the term service(noun) unifies several related concepts – and we do it justice to recognize those interrelated concepts. Using the terminology above, they’re conceptualized into a single episode. If we are clear about that, then I’ll accept that a service can be intended as either.