Model-driven development of mediation for business services using COSMO

Abstract

Although service-oriented architectures offer real benefits when pursuing business integration and flexibility, there are still no satisfactory solutions to accomplish co-operation between services of existing systems that have no perfect match. In the case of incompatible services, a Mediator may be introduced which resolves semantic and syntactic interoperability problems by intervening in the co-operation between systems. Building Mediators is currently often a manual process, resulting in dedicated IT-driven solutions, with no concern for re-use of process, models or code. This paper presents a framework to guide the development of Mediators, with the following objectives: (i) uncover and capture the actual interoperability problem that needs to be solved; (ii) allow the involvement of non-IT (i.e. business) experts in the development of the solution; (iii) support evolution of the solution and re-use of results in case of changing interoperability requirements; (iv) facilitate automation of parts of the process. The framework is based on service-oriented and model-driven techniques. Available tool support for the different elements in the framework is indicated.