An Intentional Approach to Service Engineering

Despite its growing acceptance, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) remains a computing mechanism to speed up the design of software applications by assembling ready-made software services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit of SOC if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move toward a description of services in business terms, i.e., intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search, and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages SOC to an intentional level, ISOC. We present ISM, the model to describe intentional services, and populate the service registry with their descriptions. We highlight its intention-driven perspective for service description, retrieval, and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals and to publish them in the registry. Finally, the paper introduces a set of transformations to bridge the gap from the intentional level to the implementation one.