Why SOA Needs an Ontology at This Stage in the Game

The Open Group has released the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Ontology Technical Standard, intended to define the concepts, terms and semantics of SOA in a common language that will allow for more precise and straightforward communications and facilitate SOA adoption without ambiguity.

What’s an ontology and how can it help SOA?  And why did they wait until now, when SOA has been on agendas for years?

IBM’s Heather Kreger, who contributed to the effort, explains what this all means to SOA practitioners. “Ontologies are misunderstood,” she observes. “An ontology is simply the definition of a set of concepts and the relationships between them for a particular domain — in this case, the domain is SOA.”

Don’t confuse ontologies in this context with semantic Web, she adds. And, along with being a simple glossary which defines terms, “they also define relationships between them — something important for SOA.”

Read More of Joe McKendrick’s Blog Post of ZDNet