Modelling, interlinking and discovering capabilities

Even though the concept of capability is an important element in service oriented architectures and enterprise information systems, little effort has been put towards modelling it as a first class citizen. Major related contributions were part of other efforts such as modelling business processes, service description and search requests. In case of service descriptions, current approaches confuse capabilities with invocation interfaces or do not go beyond the classical IOPEs paradigm. Both approaches do not allow to determine intuitively what the service does. In our work, we are interested in modelling and managing capabilities as stand alone entities, presented via an action verb and a set of domain related attributes. Presenting capabilities as such allows us to represent them at different levels of abstraction and make explicit links between them. These links permit to create a direct acyclic graph. Given this graph, we provide in this paper a heuristic approach for capability discovery. We also present the needed algorithms for building and maintaining such structure.