GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA

Inaldo Capistrano Costa

1, 2

and Jos

e M. Parente de Oliveira

Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Computer Science Department - IEC,

Prac¸a Mal. do Ar Eduardo Gomes, 50, S

ao Jos

e dos Campos, S

ao Paulo, Brazil

Federal University of Maranh

ao (BICT / CCET / UFMA), Av. dos Portugueses, 1966,

Cidade Universit

aria, S

ao Lu

ıs, Maranh

ao, Brazil

Keywords:

Goal-oriented Modeling, Service-oriented Applications, SOA, SOAML.

Abstract:

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a standard in business integration. In software engineer-

ing, several authors propose requirements elicitation from business goals. However, SOA application modeling

does not address these goals, causing a gap that can hinder the application design. The work outlined in this

paper proposes an approach to modeling SOA applications based on business goals. The goals are incor-

porated as semantic information to the application’s architecture and are preserved until its implementation.

Thus, the components that perform a particular business goal can be identiﬁed from its architecture model,

through detailed design, and implementation. Case study “Purchase Order” was selected to verify the pro-

posed approach. The major contribution of this research is the application of business knowledge to improve

the service’s descriptions in the application design. The case study indicated that business goals are preserved

on models and implementation, making it easy to verify, through tracing its features, if the organization’s goals

were addressed as completely as possible.

1 INTRODUCTION

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become

a standard for the integration of distributed systems,

and its adoption has grown in the new applications

developing (Rake et al., 2009). Associated with the

SOA, the application design often uses semantic re-

sources to facilitate interoperability (Agarwal et al.,

2011). Sometimes, the adoption of SOA applications

is used to facilitate collaboration between different

business domains (Elvesæter et al., 2011). This inter-

action between distinct areas happens through busi-

ness processes to meet business process goals. This

interaction between distinct areas happens through

business processes to achieve business goals.

Current SOA applications’ modeling does not ex-

press clearly the goals that are part of business pro-

cess modeling. However, service-based applications

are in place to carry out the business processes and

support their goals (Todoran et al., 2011) (Delgado

et al., 2013). Therefore, this organizational knowl-

edge should serve as a guide to deﬁne what services

will be needed and their initial requirements (Horkoff

et al., 2015).

An approach to design service-based applications

must be aligned to business processes that, in turn,

are directly linked to the organization’s goals (Guiz-

zardi and Reis, 2015). Some studies indicate that

the absence of well-documented service is one of the

main problems of the SOA applications design (Bravo

et al., 2013). This gap between business modeling and

discovery requirements contributes negatively to the

applications’ design.

This article proposes an approach to SOA appli-

cation design, named “Goal-oriented Modeling Ap-

proach for SOA (GO4SOA)” (Costa, 2015). Guided

by business goals, the designer uses modeling tech-

niques to capture the application services’ require-

ments. The goals become part of the semantic ser-

vices’ descriptions and are preserved until the imple-

mentation. Thus, all the elements that perform a spe-

ciﬁc business goal can be identiﬁed.

A proposed approach case study was developed as

an experiment. The scenario chosen was an electronic

purchase process where a consumer interacts with a

provider and performs a purchase order.

The paper is organized in the following sections.

Section 2 discusses other SOA applications modeling

proposals associated with business processes. Section

3 describes the proposed approach, detailing its com-

ponents and technologies used. Section 4 shows the

case study ”Purchase Order” with its architecture and

Costa, I. and Oliveira, J.

GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2016) - Volume 1, pages 247-254

ISBN: 978-989-758-186-1

247

modeled goals. Finally, Section 5 presents concluding

considerations about the research developed.

2 RELATED WORK

The literature has various methodologies and tech-

niques for modeling SOA applications. This section

presents a few approaches that also use the business

modeling associated with SOAML modeling.

Todoram et al. (2011) analyze and present how

SOAML complements the UML, adding advantages

for modeling services. The authors state that there is

a strong possibility of SOAML being adopted on a

large scale by industry and encourage further studies

to create approaches in that direction (Todoran et al.,

2011).

Minerva’s framework was proposed by (Delgado

et al., 2010) and aims automating the SOAML mod-

els’ generation from business processes. Therefore,

the approach integrates various paradigms such as

Business Process Management (BPM), Service Ori-

ented Computing (SOC) and Model Driven Develop-

ment (MDD).

Hu et al. (2014) presented an architectural ap-

proach, modeling and simulation type for Model

Driven System of Systems (SoS) based services. This

approach use SysML to address the complex re-

quirements inherent to SoS and SOAML to improve

project implementation (Hu et al., 2014).

The work of Fazziki et al. (2014), proposed a

Model Driven approach being intended to overcome

the gap between business requirements and service-

oriented architecture. The approach uses BPMN, and

SOAML meta model for representing business pro-

cesses in a language known by developers (Fazziki

et al., 2012).

A Model Driven approach is presented in (Xu

et al., 2009) with service-oriented systems described

using SOAML with semantic annotations. Their

approach is to create an extended version of the

SAWSDL architecture and a tool that provides an an-

notation editor. The main focus of the paper are the

SOAML model, a model-based SAWSDL version and

a platform independent editor.

We can ﬁnd that there are several efforts in the lit-

erature aimed at achieving integration between busi-

ness modeling and services-based system design.

This continuity between different levels of abstraction

seeks greater adhesion between the models. This lack

of goals in the association between the two models

can generate a gap that can hinder the identiﬁcation

of service requirements.

3 PROPOSED APPROACH

Requirements Engineering based on goals has been

considered promising as part of several software-

development processes. This section presents the pro-

posed approach to SOA application modeling based

on objective using SOAML (Service oriented archi-

tecture Modeling Language) (Berre, 2008) in con-

junction with the URN (User Requirements Notation)

(Amyot, 2003).

The proposal aims to establish a modeling process

that makes use of the knowledge captured in the busi-

ness model. Processes and organizational goals are

detailed in an intermediate model that facilitates the

transition to SOA application modeling. The tran-

sitions are facilitated by semantic information sup-

ported by ontologies, which are associated with vari-

ous artifacts of the SOA during the application devel-

opment process.

Figure 1: Proposed approach overview.

Figure 1 shows an overview of the modeling pro-

cess that is premised on the existence of a business

model wich will guide the creation of the follow-

ing models. Service requirements are extracted based

on the business model. The yellow box is the pro-

posed approach, “Goal-oriented Modeling Approach

for SOA (GO4SOA)” detailed in Figure 2.

Figure 2: SOA Application Modeling (Costa, 2015).

The modeling process starts from an existing busi-

ness model that serves as the basis for the prepara-

tion of SOAML model. In the presented approach,

SOAML model was extended by semantic annota-

tions using the standard SAWSDL. The semantic an-

notations are meant to enrich the SOAML model from

speciﬁc URN goals. As shown in Figure 2, the mod-

eling process are:

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1. Business Goals Services Requirements. At this

stage, an intermediate model that captures the

business services requirements based on goals is

built using URN.

2. SOA Application Design. SOA modeling starts

with the preparation of an architectural model

from the goals and processes that were detailed

with the URN. It makes use of SOAML enriched

with semantic annotations associated with the do-

main ontology;

3. Application Model Veriﬁcation. The SOA project

is implemented in BPEL for model veriﬁcation

purpose.

At the end of the modeling process, we have several

levels of goals and services complementary models.

The models artifacts are aligned according to domain

ontology concepts, which facilitates tracking func-

tions among the different abstraction levels.

3.1 Business Goals Services

Requirements

The SOA modeling starts with the capture of business

goals that will be reached by services based processes.

Figure 3 shows “Business Goals Services Require-

ments” phase that uses the URN to represent in more

detail the goals and processes that have been found in

a macro way in business models.

Figure 3: Business Goals Services requirements.

The URN is a visual notation that is designed to

represent functional and non-functional requirements

consistently. To achieve this purpose the URN con-

sists of two graphical notations that complement each

other: the GRL (Goal-oriented Requirement Lan-

guage) to describe the goals and the UCM (Use Case

Maps) to describe the scenarios that should perform

these goals (Amyot, 2003).

The phase “Business Goals Services Require-

ments” has as input the business model and a do-

main ontology. The following activities should be

performed in this process:

• Align the concepts between the business model

and the ontology;

• Create the GRL diagram using as the base the

business goals;

• Build the UCM diagrams with focus to achieve

the goals mapped on the GRL.

This intermediate phase between the business model

and the architectural design of the IT system is a dif-

ferential in relation to other approaches. Without this

vision, the transition between business modeling and

application design can result in erroneous decisions

and choices at the ﬁnal model.

3.2 SOA Application Design

This modeling phase starts with the creation of an ap-

plication architectural model using SOAML. As al-

ready indicated, SOAML model is annotated seman-

tically to preserve its relationship with BPMN dia-

grams and UCM. Figure 4 illustrates the “SOA Ap-

plication Modeling” process and its elements.

Figure 4: SOA Application Design.

To reference the SOAML model semantically with

a domain vocabulary, we use SAWSDL. The business

goals lists, the service capability descriptions and oth-

ers’ models artifacts can be supported by a domain

ontology. A uniﬁed vocabulary enables alignment be-

tween service capabilities and business goals.

We chose SAWSDL based on the studies by

Hobold (Hobold and Siqueira, 2012) and Sun (Sun

et al., 2012). Its conclude that SAWSDL is more ﬂex-

ible and easier to use since it is a WSDL extension.

Sun (Sun et al., 2012) also classiﬁed SAWSDL as

possessing “high semantic expressivity”.

In GO4SOA, the SOAML modeling is guided by

URN diagrams. As we can see in Figure 4, as part of

SOAML model, the semantic annotations link each

model component to “service requirements” previ-

ously represented in URN.

The activities to be developed in the “SOA Appli-

cation Modeling” processes are as follows:

• Build SOAML architecture from the GRL;

• Derive Service Interfaces from GRL resources,

UCM maps and domain ontology;

GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA

249

• Develop Service Contracts from UCM maps;

• Semantically annotate the model artifacts.

This set of models, URN and SOAML semantically

annotated produces a consistent design enough to sup-

port the implementation phase.

3.3 Application Model Veriﬁcation

The ”Application Model Veriﬁcation” modeling is

shown in Figure 5. In this phase, the BPEL process

is drawn from the SOAML enabling the veriﬁcation

of elaborated models and their adherence to business

requirements.

Figure 5: Application Model Veriﬁcation.

BPEL processes run in a prototype environment,

which enables the initial veriﬁcation of previous mod-

els. Associated with BPEL requirement tracking doc-

uments can be elaborated. From BPEL with anno-

tated WSDL, it’s possible to be listed which processes

have been implemented and what services are respon-

sible for carrying out a particular organizational goal.

The “Purchase Order” case study was developed

to experiment the GO4SOA.

4 PURCHASE ORDER

MODELING

The case study is a traditional “Purchase Order” ap-

plication. Customer search and consulting products

using an application, select items that want to buy and

submit a purchase order. A company, through web

services, conﬁrms the purchase order after selected

the delivery and payment mode. The following ap-

plication issues an invoice and a delivery protocol for

the customer.

Figure 6 illustrates the selected domain ontology

that is published on the W3C site, being used by the

SAWSDL standardization group as one of the rating

application examples (Farrell and Lausen, 2007). The

ontology describes in a simply way the fundamental

concepts associated with the ”Purchase Order“ do-

main.

Figure 7 shows one of the processes of ”Pur-

chase Order” modeled using BPMN notation (BPMN,

Figure 6: Purchase Order Ontology (Farrell and Lausen,

2007).

Figure 7: Purchase Order BPMN (BPMN, 2010).

2010). This is the primary process that begins with a

product purchase order and ends with delivery to the

customer. This BPMN diagram was used to develop

a reﬁnement of domain ontology shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Reﬁne Domain Ontology.

This reﬁnement is to align additional concepts

from business model with domain ontology. The do-

main ontology is extended by synonyms, new classes

and properties that are perceived from the BPMN di-

agram in Figure 7.

At this stage, the following concepts to add to the

domain ontology ”Purchase Order” were identiﬁed:

• Synonyms: Order = RequestPurchaseOrder

• New Classes: Quotation, Review, Seller, Ap-

prover;

• New Properties: hasCustomerApprover, hasPro-

ductApprover.

We point out that the original structure of the domain

ontology has been preserved. The BPMN process and

the reﬁned Domain Ontology are the input for the

business goals’ requirements and the SOAML mod-

eling.

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4.1 Purchase Order Business Goals

According to this approach, at this stage, from a

BPMN model, GRL and UCM diagrams are prepared

as intermediate models to represent the service re-

quirements.

To model the goals using the GRL notation, it

is necessary to identify the actors, their goals and

macro processes that will accomplish these goals. In

BPMN, Figure 7, we can identify the actors “Cus-

tomer”, “Seller” and “Shipper” as well as the macro

processes associated with “Purchase Order”. These

actors and processes were associated with goals in the

GRL from Figure 9.

Figure 9: Purchase Order GRL diagram.

The goals were modeled and represented in the

GRL diagram in Figure 9 with the processes and re-

sources required to achieve the goals. On the bor-

der of the actors, responsibilities related to their goals

are identiﬁed. The responsibilities represented in the

GRL diagram are further detailed by UCM.

Figure 10: Shopping Cart UCM diagram.

In the GRL diagram we can see that the customer

is responsible of starting two main activities, the Pur-

chase Order itself and an earlier support activity, the

Shopping Cart. The Figure 10 shows that the Shop-

ping Cart process is a simple query to a products cat-

alog made available by the seller.

Figure 11: Purchase Order UCM diagram.

Figure 11 shows the Purchase Order process mod-

eled on UCM already with the inclusion of references

to the services to be used, for example, OrderService

and ShipmentService. These services are identiﬁed

from the BPMN and GRL diagrams as well as the as-

sumption that the application uses SOA architecture.

From these perspectives represented in URN, we

have the elements necessary to start SOAML model-

ing of “Purchase Order” application.

4.2 Purchase Order Application Design

The SOAML modeling begins with the analysis of the

GRL and UCM diagrams in order to identify the capa-

bilities that must be included in the SOA architecture

model.

Figure 12 represents the main UCMs processes,

Shopping Cart (Figure 10) and Purchase Order (Fig-

ure 11) as capabilities to be offered by a seller who

wishes to provide services to a purchase order client.

These capabilities were represented using the SOA ar-

chitecture diagram: Shopping Cart, the Purchase Or-

der and Shippment.

Additional capabilities were modeled on Figure

12 from UCMs. As the UCM is related to the GRL di-

agram to be responsible for proceeding with the goals,

SOA application capabilities are also associated with

goals through semantic annotations.

To annotate the SOAML model semantically, it

was created an abstract data type based on SAWSDL

standard. This abstract data type shown in Figure 13

is inserted in SOAML diagrams and stores a refer-

ence to the concept of the domain ontology, involving

the element in focus on the vocabulary of the busi-

ness. This semantic information is designed to main-

GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA

251

Figure 12: Purchase Order SOAML Architecture.

tain consistency between the models of application

and business modeling.

Figure 13: SAWSDL Annotation Type.

Figure 14 shows an architectural diagram of a con-

sumer application that would be responsible for per-

forming the client’s goal of making a purchase sim-

ulation through a Shopping Cart. Diagrams of the

Service Provider were prepared, Figure 12, and Ser-

vices Consumer, Figure 14, so that we can demon-

strate the interaction between provider and consumer

in the case study.

Even from the UCM “Shopping Cart”, Figure 15

shows the collaboration between a consumer applica-

tion where the customer makes its electronic purchase

simulation, and a provider application in which the

services are provided to feed the necessary informa-

tion for its Shopping Cart.

When making a reference to the UCM shown in

Figure 10, we have here the division of responsi-

bilities between two actors, the consumer and the

provider. This cooperation is via a service interface,

as shown in the diagram.

With the details shown in Figure 15 and contracts

included in the SOAML model, we have the input

needed for BPEL implementation. Some SOA mod-

eling tools generate WSDL ﬁles from these elements

that can be useful to elaborate BPEL process.

Figure 14: Customer App Capability Sample.

Figure 15: Purchase Order with provider.

4.3 Purchase Order Model Veriﬁcation

Starting from UCM maps and SOAML diagrams, it

was implemented a BPEL process for the shopping

cart, as illustrated in Figure 16.

This process was simulated by the BPEL runtime

environment and presented the behavior and modeled

results. As BPEL uses to deﬁne service interfaces

WSDL ﬁles, which in our case are annotated seman-

tically, we can trace the implementation to business

goals being realized.

4.4 Results Analysis

The case study “Purchase Order” was selected with

the expectation of being achieved the following

checks regarding the proposed approach:

• To explain the preservation of the objectives in the

various models;

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252

Figure 16: Shopping Cart Purchase Order BPEL.

• To ilustrate the Domain Ontology reﬁnement;

• To explain the necessity for URN diagrams as an

intermediary model between BPMN and SOA de-

sign.

The “Customer” goal of making a purchase preview

using a “Shopping Cart” is present in the GRL dia-

gram, aimed at UCM diagram as actions, in SOAML

diagram as capacity and at BPEL process as a service.

In these diagrams are preserved the initial goal that is

always associated with the concept “Shopping Cart”

of Domain Ontology.

The Domain Ontology reﬁnement was presented,

and the main focus is to make concept alignment

with models developed by the addition of synonyms,

classes and properties. At this point, it became clear

that the original ontology was preserved in its essence

and structure.

On the need for an intermediate model be-

tween business processes and application design, we

can highlight some points that have been demon-

strated. The URN diagrams facilitated the modeling

of SOAML architecture with the discovery of capa-

bilities from the responsibilities and the nomination

of candidates to service this level of abstraction close

to business processes. The association between goals

and responsibilities, which is established in the URN,

made possible subsequent tracking that enables the

veriﬁcation of the completeness of applications de-

signed to meet business goals.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Most approaches to SOA system design end up mov-

ing away from business perspective. Designers and

developers, with its technical view, lose much of the

value that the business knowledge can bring to mod-

eling applications. The service-based computing is

closely linked to business goals and improve when

this knowledge is part of solution to be developed.

This paper presented a new approach for modeling

SOA applications based on business goals. Establish

an alignment and a direct relationship between busi-

ness processes and the application models is the main

gain in the adoption of GO4SOA. The GO4SOA,

from the point of view of the software-development

life cycle, directly contributes to improve service-

based application design. However, improvements in

implementation can be viewed as a result of the se-

mantic annotations.

The GO4SOA explores the business processes

goals from the perspective of an SOA implementa-

tion. The insertion of URN as intermediate model

is one of the approach contributions because it facil-

itates the transition between the business model and

application design, eliminating or mitigating possible

gaps between these two abstraction levels.

The modeling process is supported by a Domain

Ontology. The adoption of the ontology and its evo-

lution throughout the project contributes to the stan-

dardization and clarity of concepts and vocabulary us-

ing during the project, as well as their relationship

with each other. The use of ontology as a support

tool strengthens the semantics of each component of

model associating to business goals.

The GO4SOA uses the URN to provide subsidies

and facilitate the development of SOAML application

design. Semantic annotations in SOAML artifacts re-

late the elements of the business domain concepts to

model, enabling an understanding of the association

between application and business goals. These se-

mantic annotations enable a strong relationship be-

tween objectives, service requirements, architecture

and implementation, associated to business process

goals.

Thus, the GO4SOA enables a smoother transition

between the various levels of abstraction preserving

the knowledge and concepts through a domain ontol-

ogy that is updated during the modeling process. The

case study indicated that business goals are preserved

on all models. This was more explicit in SOAML

model with semantic annotations, enriching the ar-

chitecture and providing more consistency to its ele-

ments and service descriptions. Future work includes

the development of additional case studies in more

complex scenarios.

GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA

253

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