Service Oriented Computing: Opportunities and Challenges

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are emerging as the technologies and architectures of choice for implementing distributed systems. Recent advances and standardization efforts in SOAs provide necessary building blocks for supporting the automated development and interoperability of services. Although, standardization is crucial by no means is sufficient. Wide spread adoption of service technologies requires high level framework and methodology and identification of appropriate abstractions and notations for specifying service requirements and characteristics to support automated development and interoperability. In this paper, we identify interoperability layers of SOAs, review major approaches for service development and highlight some research directions.