International Business Machines Corporation

Steven Teleki

Matthew Sanchez

Gopal Krishnan

Christopher Sanchez

Shardul Deo

Aaron Dixon

A SOBA lifecycle methodology is provided for assembling and maintaining service-oriented business applications (SOBAs) for effective functionality and interoperability. SOBAs are loosely coupled business processes and applications in which all functions are defined as independent, semantically-aware business services, with distributed assembly from a global chain of providers. One useful prerequisite for the methodology is analyzing the associated SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy and infrastructure such as the hardware, software, human resources, and deployment strategy. A second prerequisite is analyzing the associated SOA governance process for how all the resources of the SOBA will work together. Governance refers to design, release, run-time, and manage-time functions. The SOBA lifecycle methodology comprises selecting business functions and processes for the SOBA; populating a business services catalog with information about the SOBA and its components; developing and configuring the SOBA; testing and deploying components of the SOBA; setting up and operating the SOBA; and maintaining the SOBA.

Loosely coupled applications lifecycle methodology

A utility transforms a class diagram representing an ontology, such as a UML class diagram, into a fully-described, standard representation of an ontology such as OWL file. It may be based on Rational Software Architect (RSA) and its model transformation capabilities. The RSA transformation framework uses a Visitor-like pattern for iterating over all of the UML elements in a UML diagram. The framework allows the developer to configure 'Rule' classes that are executed when different types of UML elements are encountered. Each UML element is visited once, which causes each rule to be fired for each element type. Rules are configured for just those UML types that are of interest to the transformation, for example classes, primitives, properties, packages and instances. Each rule in the implementation is then written to delegate to a Registrar class, which has a method for building the ontology model from the registered UML elements.

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Cedar Park, TX, United States of America

Steven Teleki